The Sun, Tarot and Art

Often when I look at particular pieces of art, I see a connection to the Tarot. I think some of this is because Tarot is such an important tool for me, but it is also because the Tarot archetypes are part of our collective unconscious. And then, of course, there are some situations where the Tarot did actually influence a piece of art or an artist in some way!  I’d like to explore the connection between Tarot and art, on both a historical and spiritual level. 

So let’s look at The Sun

The Sun is one of the most positive cards in the Tarot deck. It is about warmth, revelations, healing, and being your true self. 

Some Sun cards, like the first known one from the Visconti-Sforza deck, and The Sun from the Rider-Waite deck, depict a naked, youthful figure under the sun. Other versions of the card, including those from the Tarot of Marseilles and the Book of Thoth, feature two children (usually identified as twins) naked or nearly naked under the sun.

However many children there are, you could say that they represent fully basking in the sun’s glow – the light of joy, happiness, and self-fulfillment. The Sun is a card that is about being your truest, best self, so that light practically radiates from you.

It’s easy to see why such a celestial body would inspire these feelings. The sun is our star here on earth, and its warmth helps everything on the earth grow. We love to bask in sunlight, and our mental and physical health is improved by exposure to the sun’s rays.

The sun has played a major role in life on this planet ever since this planet came into existence. Our prehistoric ancestors chose to depict the sun in their cave paintings, and the  solar figures in the Magura Cave (located in present-day Bulgaria) look so similar to what any one of us would draw if asked to make a sun today – a disk with rays of light coming from it, that it’s just not funny. 

Many early and ancient civilizations came to worship the sun (and some modern-day religions still do) as one of their deities. The sun was even the first monotheistic deity. The Egyptian god Aten  was the embodiment of life, male and female. Unlike previous Egyptian deities, Aten couldn’t be depicted in any physical form, and was represented as the sun – more specifically, the sun’s rays. Here are two famous engravings of Aten, one with Akhenaton, the pharaoh who popularized his worship, and his family participating in a ceremony for the deity, and one where Aten shines his rays benevolently upon Akhenaton and his family. 

Some Tarot scholars, including Court de Gébelin and Etteilla, believed that the influences and practice of Tarot can be traced back to Ancient Egypt. Whether or not this theory is correct, we can already see the importance and value of the sun, and depictions showing people happy and healing in its light, on engravings like these.

Although the exclusive worship of Aten was quickly banned in favor of a return to a multitheistic religion, the ancient reverence for the sun continued in Egypt and in other ancient cultures, including the Greeks and Romans. 

Greco-Roman cultures often depicted the sun as a disk in the chariot of the god Helios, who was responsible for driving it across the sky and bringing it back for a new day. Later, the god Apollo also became associated with the sun. The ancient Greek bas relief shown here of Helios sculpted at some point after 300 BC gives a good idea of the next step in the evolution of the depiction of the sun – the sun with a face. 

Many of the best-known Tarot decks feature a sun with a face. This sort of imagery began around the early years AD, in cultures in various places around the world. For our purposes, it’s interesting to see that it was well in place in European art in the Middle Ages. If you do an internet search for “sun in medieval art” you’ll see countless suns with faces. This type of depiction seems to have evolved from the connection of deities and the sun (think, for example, of how Helios looks in the last image I mentioned), and may also reference the divine light surrounding  holy Christian figures’ heads (often also depicted as halos). 

As an interesting side note, at the same time, across the world, civilizations like the Aztecs and Inca were also depicting the sun (a deity in their cultures) with a face. You can see this on the famous Aztec sun stone and in numerous examples of Inca art. These cultures were probably not influenced by tarot, and probably didn’t influence the artists who created tarot cards, either. But I find it fascinating that despite being on the other side of the world, in a completely different culture, they, too, depicted the sun this way.

The first known tarot deck, called the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck, dates from about 1450, the end of the Middle Ages. No single complete deck exists; it’s actually made up of cards from about fifteen different contemporary decks. The Visconti-Sforza deck Sun card shows a winged angel or putti playing with what looks a red, stoic-faced head than the sun in the sky. Still, this bold gesture perfectly captures the joy and confidence that The Sun card represents. 

With the Renaissance, mainstream European art tended to move towards realism, which means the sun was usually depicted without a face, at least in the “high art” that we know today. But the representation held in alchemy, which had become more popular in the 12th century and continued to hold a certain fascination for centuries after. Some esoteric scholars believe there are connections between tarot and alchemy. In addition to the more philosophical and spiritual aspects of these two subjects, there is also a simple artistic connection: As the author of this fascinating article points out, artists who illustrated books on alchemy likely also were commissioned to create tarot decks. 

We can find echoes of The Sun card in in the 16th century book Splendor Solis (The Splendor of the Sun), an allegorical story of death and rebirth. The sun is depicted in several of its colorful illustrations. The most striking to me is the final illustration, showing a prominent red sun shining over a city. According to this source, the term rubedo (“redness”) was a sign of success in alchemy, and of a great work accomplished. These are similar to the feelings evoked by The Sun card in tarot: reveling in the joy of the sun and celebrating yourself and your accomplishments.  In this depiction of rubedo , the sun shines out boldly, dwarfing the landscape, basking buildings and sky in its glow.

The Tarot of Marseilles possibly originated around this time, although the first known deck dates to 1650.In this version of The Sun card, the sun has a sober face nearly identical to the expression of the sun’s in the rubedo depiction. But its rays now seem curiously more like drops of water than the linear rays we’ve seen in every other sun depiction until now. The Tarot of Marseilles is also one of the decks that features two naked children, rather than a single figure, basking in the sun’s glow.

Back in the art world, in the 18th and early 19th century, the Romantic movement put spirituality front and center in mainstream art again. Masters like Caspar David Friedrich often depicted figures looking out at the glory and majesty of nature. His “Woman Before the Rising Sun” doesn’t feature the sun itself (it’s rising from behind a distant mountain), but the woman staring at the glow it’s produced holds out her arms, welcoming it into the day.

A little more than fifty years later, what’s become possibly the most famous sunrise in art was painted: Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”, the work that officially started the Impressionist movement. The sun in this painting is more abstract than any we’ve seen before – just a glowing, orange ball. But what Monet did with this canvass was to break from convention, to celebrate the sunrise as he saw it with his own eyes, not through the “rules” of art at the time. In this sense, you could say that “Impression: Sunrise” carries with it the essence of The Sun card: the idea of celebrating the self, of letting yourself shine and feeling joy.

A few decades later, in 1909, A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith collaborated to create what has become probably the most popular Tarot deck ever printed, the Rider-Waite deck. Pamela kept many medieval, Renaissance, and mystical artistic influences in mind. Her Sun card shows a banner-bearing child joyfully riding a horse underneath a smiling sun. 

Art around Pamela’s time had already branched out to a myriad of movements, including photography. Solar photography and, later, photographs of the sun from high-powered telescopes and satellites, gave us yet another visual representation of the sun  – this one, of course, of the actual, physical heavenly body. 

Still, despite this new, scientific imagery, the sun with a face continued to show up everywhere – and it still does, from “New Age” home decorations, to children’s books and cartoons. As most of you reading this probably know, the sun with a face is even an emoji!

As for Tarot art, another famous, fairly recent deck, is Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth. The Sun card in this deck seems to combine the Visconti-Sforza deck’s idea of a winged figure interacting with the celestial body, with the Marseilles Tarot’s depiction of two figures dancing in the sun. But the card has its own original touches, as well. The wings of the two figures look like those of butterflies and – most notably – the sun has swirling rays and its center looks like a flower. But for all of its differences, the basic meaning of The Sun remains the same. 

In contemporary decks, you’ll find all sorts of Sun cards – some with suns that have faces, some without, some with one figure, some with two, some with none at all, and so on. You can see a selection of Sun cards at the bottom of this webpage and here is an image of the Tarot Oil Tarot decks version of The Sun card.

You could say that The Sun is one of the easiest Tarot cards for the average person to understand. Unlike cards with a more ambiguous significance or even a meaning that’s the opposite of what might be expected, the appreciation for the sun’s light seems to be part of the human experience, and has inspired art throughout history.

Is there a version of The Sun card that speaks to you the most?  Whichever it is, take comfort in its message of joy and self-fulfillment, and just to finish off, here’s a little vid that is focussed on the Sun archetype in relation to the Sun Tarot Oil.