The Sun
Trump XIX of the tarot: the sun shining over a child. A. E. Waite read it as material happiness and contentment.
Meaning
In Waite's card a naked child rides a white horse beneath the sun, holding a red standard, before a walled garden. Older cards, he noted, showed two children playing or running hand in hand inside a wall, beneath a sun whose rays are alternately waved and pointed.
What does the Sun card mean?
Waite's meanings are "material happiness, fortunate marriage, contentment"; reversed, "the same in a lesser sense".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Sole. Papus joined it to the nineteenth Hebrew letter, Qoph.
See also
The Moon, The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research