The Sun Tarot Card Meaning
Keywords: Happiness – Innocence – Success
Description
A child joyously stretches his arms. He’s sitting atop a white horse symbolizing purity and freedom of spirit. Beside the child is a red-orange banner representing celebration, vitality, and health. Behind the child is a garden wall and a field of sunflowers. The child’s head is also adorned with a sunflower crown. Sunflowers traditionally symbolize happiness and hope. The sun itself shines above the scene. The sun is a symbol of illumination, happiness, hope, and positivity.
The Sun is the twentieth card of the Major Arcana. It symbolizes innocence, joy, success, security, vitality, and happiness.
Upright Meanings for the Sun Tarot Card
The Sun is one of the most positive cards in the tarot. If you’re looking for a clear “YES”, this is it!
It represents happiness and joy. Pay close attention to where this card shows up in your reading. This will point you to a path of happiness and fulfillment.
After a rough patch, this is a positive indicator of better times to come. It’s a reminder to not give up hope.
The Sun card can also speak to inner-child work. This card can appear in a reading to suggest remembering things that brought you joy when you were younger. It can be a call to engage in fun activities like play, dancing, and creative activities. As we grow older, we forget these simple pleasures that are soothing and rejuvenating. Grab those pencils and adult coloring books! Or maybe you’re more of the paintball type? Either way, embrace fun!
The Sun card can also represent security and confidence. The child on the card is au natural — and has no embarrassment or anxiety over it! You’re feeling secure and safe in your relationships or where you’re at in life. Feel confident in your decisions because you’re doing great!
This is a good indicator card for mental and physical health. It’s a card of vigor, vitality, and feeling younger again. It represents recovery from setbacks.
Spiritually, the Sun represents enlightenment. It’s a beautiful card to appear in readings related to explorations into your personal spirituality. Pay attention to big breakthroughs and realizations.
Love and Relationships
This is a card of playful, fun relationships. It can represent new love that is rejuvenating and positive. For established relationships, it suggests a period of happiness.
When it appears in a reading regarding relationship conflicts, this card often means there isn’t a conflict. Sometimes we read too much into events. Overthinking can twist them into anxiety-inducing scenarios. This is especially true if you’ve had an abusive relationship in the past. The Sun card reminds us that this trauma is in the past —you’re safe now. Don’t be afraid to enjoy yourself right now.
Very rarely, when the Sun appears as a negative influence in a reading, it can hint at too much fun in a relationship. If a new relationship is affecting your personal, professional, or financial responsibilities, this is a warning to get back on track before you get completely derailed.
If you’re looking for a new relationship, this is a big indication of success! A new, fun relationship is around the corner. Friendships represented by this card are positive, fun, and fulfilling.
Career and Work
The Sun is a great card to appear in a career reading. Its bright energy brings lightness to everything it touches. You’ll find success and achievement in your current work and projects. This card can suggest fame and professional recognition as well. Others are noticing your contributions. This is your time to shine! All of your hard work and effort has paid off.
It’s also a wonderful card for abundance and security. It can indicate a time where your hustle is paying off in comfort and abundance. It can also represent finally getting in a groove at work. You’re now rightly confident in your abilities.
The Sun card would be an unusual card to appear in a reading for workplace conflict. It’s such an overwhelmingly positive card that it’s hard to dampen its spirit. In an upright position, it could suggest a lack of issues. Otherwise, it might hint at some naivety about your job. Perhaps things are too fun at your workplace? It’s important to keep morale up and not have your nose constantly to the grindstone. But jobs, where there’s low productivity and too much goofing off, are not going to last. This would be a good opportunity to pull clarifying cards for a clearer answer.
As potential work or careers, the Sun favors work with children and animals (particularly horses, of course). It can suggest coaches (especially those who focus on positivity mindset) and athletes. Work where you are running solo or in the limelight are worth exploring.
People and Personalities
Individuals represented by the Sun card are confident, self-assured, and positive. These are typically extroverts and people-persons. They can be a lot of fun to be around.
The Sun card represents the metaphysical element of Fire. It can refer to a person who is a fire sign (Aries, Sagittarius, Leo), but particularly Leos.
The Sun Reversed Tarot Card Meaning
Reversed Keywords: Pessimism – Rigidness – Burnout
Reversed Meanings for the Sun Tarot Card
With the Sun card, the potential for its bright, positive energy is always there. But when reversed, that brightness is diminished.
The Sun card reversed often signals a dampening of its natural positivity. At worst, it can be an outright pessimism. But often, it’s a situation or a new piece of information that’s squashed a good time. Party over. One of the good things about this card reversed is that the sun won’t be extinguished forever and good times will return.
Sometimes the Sun hints at a misguided pursuit of happiness. This can take the form of looking for fulfillment in the wrong relationships or jobs. Or, finding happiness through buying material things. Although these days, we tend to think that decluttering and minimalism will make us happier, but that’s not always the case. It sounds cliché, but happiness is an inside job. The Sun card reversed reminds us of this. Don’t place your happiness in the hands of others or things.
The Sun card can also be a gentle reminder to lighten up. Don’t be so rigid in your outlook, schedule, or habits. Allow for some spontaneity in your life. Everything won’t fall apart if you let yourself relax for a bit. Find your joy again.
Reversed Love and Relationships
The Sun reversed can single disillusionment in both romantic relationships or friendships. This can indicate a time where patience and goodwill have worn thin.
It can also suggest that you are feeling unsupported in the relationship. This is a hard issue to solve because it could be originating from a misunderstanding or from a true lack of support. Explore whether clarifying your needs will improve the relationship. Sometimes you have to tell people what you need. On the other hand, if you’re experiencing outright sabotage from someone else, don’t tolerate it.
Reversed Career and Work
The Sun card reversed can represent a bump in the road in a career reading. There are often jobs or work that aren’t quite the right fit for you. It might have looked good on paper —but once you got there, it fell short of your expectations.
The Sun reversed can represent burnout. You need a break. If you can’t take time off, make sure that your life outside of work is as stress-free as possible. Sometimes life temporarily hands us a double whammy of a hard job and a difficult home life. Even then, you must find time to destress and take care of yourself. Find activities or hobbies that allow you to take your mind off things. Your happiness and well-being are always your responsibility to cultivate. No one can do that for you. You’re worth caring for.
Conversely, this card can appear reversed when the newness of a job is causing stress. As they say: you don’t know what you don’t know —and sometimes that can get us in trouble. You may need additional training or a mentor to give you more insights into your work.
Reversed People and Personalities
Individuals represented by the Sun card reversed may tend towards pessimism. It can represent an excess of this card’s positive energy, suggesting immaturity or childishness. Both things are remedied by taking responsibility for where you’re currently at. Work on cultivating a better mindset. There are others who would love the resources at your disposal. Sometimes we need to get a broader look at our lives to see how good we have it.
Correspondences
Astrology: Sun
Element: Fire
Numerology: 20, 1 (see the Magician), and 10 (see the Wheel of Fortune)
Affirmation
I am creating a life of happiness and joy.
Some of My Favorite Examples of the Sun Card
The figure in the Circo Tarot holds the sun while she enjoys a day at the beach —or maybe she’s getting a pool-side tan? I love the playful reinterpretation that Marisa de la Peña used for this card. While she might be leisurely lounging, you could also argue that she’s standing triumphantly while holding the sun as her prize. I also like to think her comfortableness in a bikini evokes the themes of security and confidence in the Sun card! The whole card is bright, cheery, and warm.
The Our Tarot deck features Sister Rosetta Tharpe as there Sun card. The bright colors drew me in, and I must admit, I didn’t know who Tharpe was —which is a shame because she inspired early rock and blues musicians. Her inclusion as the Sun touches on the confidence, joy, and limelight that this card can bring. Tharpe’s career began in the 1930s as a gospel singer, but she soon brought her unique style to nightclubs. At the time, her pioneering use of distortion using an electric guitar was almost unheard of. Rather than blend in with the crowd, Tharpe transformed modern rock-and-roll forever. The Sun can be a reminder to stay true to yourself and your gifts. What you have to offer this world is important.
The Light Grey Tarot is a collaborative deck from Light Grey Labs. In their Sun card, we see the familiar motifs of sunflowers, a child wearing a flower crown, and a white horse (reimagined as a hobby horse toy). Her figure obscures the sun, but it still shines brightly behind her. For me, this card captures the imaginative play and innocence of childhood. The sunflowers dwarf her, allowing her to explore their shadowy rows as if they are secret passages. It reminds me of how magical these tiny, mundane spaces could become with just a little imagination. I think the Sun card often challenges us to infuse our lives with more wonder.
Aquarian Tarot (affiliate link)
The Sun is one of my favorite cards from the classic Aquarian Tarot. I love the 70’s inspired art deco style. This deck was one of the first ones I used to truly begin to learn tarot. It holds a special place in my heart! The Sun here sticks out as a cheerier card in an otherwise airy, wintery deck.
The Dreaming Way Tarot’s Sun card features a very young child crawling out from a cluster of sunflowers. There’s a charmingly oversized lollipop (when’s the last time you had one of those?) beside him. Illustrator Kwon Shina captures the child in a sweet smile. He’s thoroughly enjoying his day. We don’t see what the child is looking at that prompted his a rosy-cheeked grin. But the child facing away toward the edge of the image, and the diagonal design of the image, suggests movement. The child seems to be thinking about crawling over to someone or something else. Like the child, we should all follow our own joy.
The Sun card from the Starchild Tarot is interesting to me. The otherworldly landscape is digitally collaged from desert mountains. There’s a giant sun above, eclipsing the landscape. Unlike the typically overly positive or cheery Sun cards, this feels decidedly neutral. It makes sense —the sun can be an overbearing and overwhelming force. Ask anyone living in a desert! The illuminating light of the sun may reveal more than we intended. This sun has layers and rings around it. It suggests the messy process that is self-illumination and enlightenment.
The Sun Tarot Card Keywords – Upright and Reversed