The Sun: Painful, Perfect Clarity
image: a baby in a blue shirt and white pants playing with legos on a cloudy sky background. A sunflower and some stems of elecampane are on the left side of the baby.
Have you ever been so depressed, hungover, or deep in grief that you’ve been like “fuck the sun?”
Yeah, same.
As a rejecter of Pollyanna bullshit around tarot, rosy views of The Sun card are a major sticking point for me. The Sun may make us optimistic, it may get us pregnant, it may greet us on vacation, it may even make some shit better--but that’s not why it’s here.
In fact, The Sun barely cares about any of that. What The Sun is here to do is show us the truth in the clear light of the morning after. And, sometimes, the truth fucking sucks.
Tarot’s Sun card is like waking up next to an ex you swore you weren’t even going to text back. It asks you how you feel now that you not only went for a drink with them, but had a night of drinks, and dancing, and devastatingly tepid sex with them.
The central question of tarot’s Sun is “now that you know, what are you going to do?” Which is why, especially now, I say “fuck The Sun.”
Some of you may be wondering where I've been. The truth is simple: in grief and great joy. I learned how to drive, I bought a car, I married that guy I met on Clubhouse a few years back. Happiness, if I am to be its steward, often requires my full attention.
Unfortunately, so does sorrow. My cousin, a weird fellow traveler and family historian, died young this year on my birthday. It was very complex and taxing. The eclipses that ended last year brought her back into my life. The ones this year took her out of her own, and everyone else's.
She was strange and radiant, zipping along in her orange truck, looking gay but somehow, not being gay. Hence how we fell out a couple years back.
I'm estranged from 95% of my living family, and so I'm careful when I speak to the rest. My exact location is a secret. So when I started physically transitioning, there wasn't anyone to tell who couldn't see for themselves.
Raven was the exception, and she took the news whimsically, though poorly. She had the essence of a sprite; I could never be quite sure we walked the same earth.
Death is demythologizing.
When I heard she was ill, it was because she asked me how I do it, how I survive being sick. Illness and magic is what my family, who at this point scarcely know me, know me for. It's the light by which they see me.
When they need advice on either, they come a calling. Then, I'm asked to illuminate the nuance of the questions posed to me.
So when she came up, I had a moment with The Sun. From far away, I could imagine that she was experiencing a momentary interruption from an otherwise charmed life. When I saw her, so thin at her full 5'10, I couldn't further delude myself. Seeing her was clarity, it was the truth.
So, instead, she flashed me, and I got it, and we went to the herb farm. I gave her access to whatever magic she thought helpful. We spoke with the ancestors we share — her great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather were brothers. She passed me the keys to the family tree, which she'd long helped steward.
In the months after, from my perspective, were the same as watching her orange truck meet the horizon as she drove back to Jersey. Little by little, the silence crept in. Her driving became walking; her standing became sitting, then laying down, then sleep, as it is now.
As Alice Sparkly Kat writes in Post-Colonial Astrology, the sun is, under Christian colonialism, a metaphor for their God, "the One." "As a solar god," Sparkly Kat explains, "the One is never seen but always one who sees."
When I reached my thirties, or even a bit before, The Sun became a loaded card in my client readings, for The Sun not only suggests pregnancy, it warns of it!
Clients on the eve of their weddings, with bum boyfriends, or who aren't sure whether they want to be parents at all, despite the pressings of a parent or partner greet The Sun with far too much delight.
The baby on The Sun can be, and more often than readers admit, is literal. It may be your inner child, it may be your niece, but its just as good at reminding you of your relationship to parenting.
Do you even want it? If so, when and how? With whom? In the twenties version of my practice, The Sun sometimes heralded the arrival of a baby. It was more likely, though, to bring a vacation or a break in a dismal bout of melancholy.
It still does these things, and still, I'm surprised at how often the clarity it asks for has to do with other people. With the need to see them, and the potential consequences of loving them.
The Sun asks us to tap into the most omniscient part of our intuitions. It asks us to differentiate between what we sense, or even feel, and what we see.
Does it match up? This is in large part why the babies announce themselves. If you're not planning for a baby, or only abstractly, there's a need to really see what that may mean for your life, goals, and family.
The same, however can be said for all relationships for which we take responsibility. How clearly do you see your mother or your lovers? How clearly do you see parts of yourself?
That's The Sun's work to do, and like a third degree sunburn after riding a hot dog floaty on Riis Beach, it can fuckin suck.
Yet it also sucks when it doesn't show up.
In Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day," a classroom of nine year olds wait for one hour of sunshine to cut through the near-permanent rainfall. That's all they get for seven years, because their scientist parents moved them to Venus.
Most of them don't remember the sun. The last time the rain stopped they were only two. One little girl, Margot, got to Venus two years after the rest. She remembers the sun; the other children hate her for it.
"It's like a penny," Margot insists, "It's like a fire...in the stove." This only makes her classmates more resentful; they stuff her in a closet so she'll miss her brief summer.
Margot is right, and she knows she's right. She won't let them bully or beat her into doubt about what she knows. They took the literal sun from her, hoping to keep her in the dark where they live.
Through her memory, through an internal, private sight, Margot keeps her truth. She sees though her memory and understanding are unseen.
Such moments of clarity and honesty are often enclosed by false interpretation, and confusion, like the clouds threaten the lambent ring of an eclipse. Like Margot and her classmates, both the truth of The Sun, and the reality of everything else, can win at once.
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
"The way we talk about healing in spiritual spaces can be fucked up! At best, it's vague and sprawling. At worst, its just straight up ableism. No wonder it's unable to account for what cannot be healed, only accepted.
It is in these moments of radical, uncanny acceptance where we find tarot's Temperance."