The Sun.
Out from behind the wall, arms out.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A naked child rides a white horse with no saddle and no reins, holding a large red banner. Behind, a grey brick wall runs right across the card with four sunflowers over the top of it. A sun with a face is above.
The warmth is the easy part of this card to see. The child has come out from behind something solid and grey, and the wall is the one cold thing in the picture. You came out from behind something. Nobody made you, and it is still standing there.
Four things people go to on this card
- the wall
You went to the wall. Grey brick, running right across the card behind the horse, sunflowers over the top.
There is a boundary in this card and nobody mentions it. It is solid, it is grey, it is the full width of the picture, and the child has come out from behind it.
So this is not a card about there being no wall. It is a card about being on this side of one, and the drawing spends real attention on the brickwork. Whatever you got out of, the picture puts it behind you and does not pretend it has gone. It is still there, and you are not in it.
What did you come out from behind, and is it still standing there?
- the child
You stopped at the rider. Naked, on a white horse, no saddle and no reins.
A competence that does not know it is one. Nobody is holding on to anything. The horse is walking, the arms are out, and the child is not braced for a fall it has not thought about.
This is the least complicated card in the deck and the hardest thing to be, and the deck gives it to a small child on purpose, because adults cannot do it deliberately. Something you are doing at the moment is going well and you are not braced for it. Notice that before you tense up.
What are you doing at the moment that you are not braced for?
- the banner
The flag caught you. Large, red, held out in one hand, and bigger than the child holding it.
Something is being announced. A flag is not a private object; it exists to be seen from a distance by people who are not in the conversation. The gladness in this card is not being kept indoors.
Worth taking seriously if you have been keeping something good quiet. The picture has a naked child carrying it out into the open on a white horse, which is not a subtle arrangement and was not meant to be. Somebody would want to know your good news. You have decided on their behalf that they would not.
What good thing have you been keeping quiet, and who would want to know?
- the sunflowers
You counted the sunflowers. Four of them, over the top of the wall, all turned the same way.
The ordinary business of following warmth. Four sunflowers on a wall, doing what sunflowers do, and not one of them is doing anything clever or difficult.
Other printings have more of them and four is enough for the point. Attention goes where the warmth is, it does not need to be a decision, and it happens whether or not anybody writes it down. You are already turned towards something. You did not choose it, and it is worth knowing what it is.
What are you turned towards at the moment without having decided to be?
On the Tree of Life, The Sun is the thirtieth path, Resh, from Hod to Yesod, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.