The Rose Tarot Sun

Let’s spend this summer studying The Sun card! Each entry between now and August (8 total) will feature a Sun card from a different deck along with the text the creator wrote for it. It will be interesting to see how so many people see difference aspects of this apparently simple card.

Let’s visit the Sun in Nigel Jackson’s Rose Tarot.

The Sun here portrays Apollo, the solar divinity, playing upon his 7-stringed lyre, as a flower-chapleted youth amid blossoms and verdure; under the resplendent face of the Sun two swans float upon a pool – these are the sacred swans of Apollo who draw the sun-chariot of the god of light (or ‘light of God’, Divine Intellect). In this vehicle every 19 years the divinity returns to visit his temple in the northern paradise of light, Hyperborea where ‘the sound of the harp doth lead up and down the Hyperborean swans’ (Cornelius Agrippa). This blissful, mysterious ‘Land beyond the North Wind’ cannot be attained by ordinary means – the poet Pindar said ‘neither by land nor by sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans.’

Porphyry taught that ‘The sun and moon are the gates of souls, which ascend through the sun, and descend through the moon’. This card represents the imperishable realm of immortals achieved via the Janua Coeli, the ‘gate of gods’ which opens beyond time and space to the state of spiritual liberation. The Sun at the north solstice marks the ‘Sun-door’, the threshold of the ‘Olympian’ way – and permits spiritual ascent and demortalization in solar regeneration, the realization and fixation of Gold and the Spirit at the solar centre. Here the esoteric ‘auroral’ symbolism of the Sun is orientated to the primordial light streaming from the celestial pole in the cosmic north – the ‘sun shining at midnight’.

The solar centre is the heart of the cross according to Boehme’s esoteric teachings. Swedenborg expounds upon the sun of the spiritual world, toward which the faces of the angelic orders are perpetually turned. ‘Heaven’s sun is the Lord: light there is the divine truth and warmth the divine good that radiate from the Lord as the sun.’ The alternating straight and flame-like rays of the sun symbolize light/gnosis and fire/love respectively, emanating from the solar heart-centre.

Divinatory Meanings:

Happiness, geniality, joy. Brilliance and acclaim. Enlightenment, triumph, success. Good health and gratitude. Creativity. Truth, realization, regeneration.