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
The Morgan Library & Museum's Sun belongs to its Visconti-Sforza cards, which the museum says were probably made by Bonifacio Bembo, about 1450–1480. The Sun is later: the museum gives it to Antonio Cicognara, about 1480–1500. A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Sole. Papus joined it to the nineteenth Hebrew letter, Qoph.
Tears of gold
Court de Gébelin read the drops falling from the sun's rays as "tears of gold and of pearls", the good influences of the chief of stars. Éliphas Lévi reported that the two children of the older cards were sometimes replaced by a spinner unwinding destinies, and otherwise by a naked child on a white horse with a scarlet standard. Waite called the child "a much better symbol" and put it on his own card. Romain Merlin matched the card with Sol in the engraved Italian series called the Mantegna cards, and in Giuseppe Maria Mitelli's Bolognese tarocchino, of which the British Museum has three sets, the Sun is Apollo.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsJudgementTrump XX of the tarot: an angel sounding a trumpet as the dead rise. A. E. Waite read it as change of position and renewal.
- The same shape in Angel numbers000 angel numberThree zeros, read by angel-number writers as a message about God and wholeness. Doreen Virtue’s 1999 list called 000 a reminder that “you are one with God” and a sign that a situation has come full circle.
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
- The Sun (Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards), The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (Wayback Machine copy, 10 November 2025), MS M.630 (no. 13)
- Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (Wayback Machine copy, 10 July 2026), collection introduction
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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