The Sun
Trump XIX in Thoth deck
Drawn—
Monday April 10th, 2023
Sun in Aries
Moon in disseminating phase in Sagittarius.
The Card: The Sun, Trump XIX in Thoth deck.
The Sun, our Father! Soul of Life and Light, Love and play freely, sacred in Thy sight!
Initial Thoughts on card:
The swirling source of all energy and light and warmth which are all different descriptions of the same, fundamental, generative force.
A petaled rose at the heart of the sun—like the affirmative rose of rosy cross.
12 rays divide each sign of the zodiac with Capricorn at the top, Cancer at the bottom: a possibly mirror of the lobster at bottom of Rider Waite Moon Card, which is actually a Scarab Beetle in the Crowley deck: the most crab like of bugs.
Angels with butterfly wings hale this sun. A green, spangled hill stretches toward it, and is that man we see below? Circles beneath angels?
And the magic therein:
“Stay Solar” is the motto of homofascist bodybuilder Jack Donavan. The sun is also of great importance to Bronze Age Pervert who recommends at least 30 minutes of sunbathing a day and tells us in Bronze Age Mindset “you’re meant to worship the sun, remember the song of New Order.”
Early intrigue with magic--which for me came from reading Kenneth Anger’s Wikipedia page --also relevant to considerations of the sun. Per Wikipedia: Anger practices Thelema, which he considers a solar, masculine religion in contrast to wicca as a lunar feminine religion.
We see the radiant, clear, apollonian light of sun is appealing to men’s men: men who prefer the company of men, whether gay, chauvinist, or both.
But how has the sun affected my life?
In every way. I could of course bore you with the scientific details of how the sun is the source of all life: it’s rays phallic penetrators of the earth below, inseminating all with energy. The sun is our eternal father and worthy of worship; or the most direct physical manifestation of God the Father, take your pick.
Long before I began doing yoga in earnest—during the pandemic when I could do this kind of thing in the middle of the work-day—I made weightlifting in the sun my yoga, trading reps for asanas of my own creation, usually wearing just shorts or less, usually listening to Caribbean Rhythms, bronzing in Los Angeles sun sans sunscreen, ignoring dermatologist’s warnings about skin cancer in pursuit of an older wisdom. Regardless of how good it is or isn’t for my skin, I know it’s good for my soul. Call it a Vitamin D blast, or think of it in more spiritual terms. Sun Power. Never underestimate how just 10 minutes of midday sun can change your frame of mind.
Couple a sunbathing/weightlifting/yoga routine with a blast of freezing water by way of cold shower immediately afterward and tell me you don’t feel like Apollo incarnate on earth: calm, focused, strong.
The upshot:
Keep some fire alive inside you. This is especially important if you are a man, or even if not for the “masculine spirit within you”. Do this by excerising, getting sun, and working on creative projects. This is how you’ll let your light into the world.
Everything in the world wants to suck your light, your energy away, but find rituals, routines and practices that allow you to concentrate it in a way that is in line withyour will. For your benefit and satisfaction.
Other Versions:
Both the Hermetic version of the sun (left) and the Rider Waite version (right) preserve some idea of the sun as the swirling source of energy. A source of energy which finds it’s fruition on earth in flowers, femininity, and in the Rider Waite deck: I think in the child of a new aeon.
Crowley’s and other interpretations:
Normie/cursory readings view this as a straightforwardly positive and optimistic card.
Crowley in Book of Thoth describes the presence of the Zodiac in it as “a kind of childish representation of the body of Nuith, a differentiation and classification, a chosen belt, one girdle of Our Lady of infinite space.” The Zodiac is a cosmic model, in short, which attempts to encapsulate the un-encapsulatable. It is a complete model which represents an infinity that cannot in fact be modeled in its completion (is at least how I read Crowley here).
Crowley says the wall atop the green hill indicates “that the aspiration of the new Aeon does not mean the absence of control”, bringing the masculine attributes championed by “far right” thinkers above in contact more less right-traditionalist, more aeonic/aquarian modes of thought. My initial reading of the card leans toward a certain masculinism, in short, but this is far from the be all end all .
The two circles beneath the angles— which Crowley describes not as angels, but as twin children— in fact are “the most sacred signs of the old Aeon, the combination of the Rose and Cross from which [children] are arisen, yet which still forms their support.”
The rose of the rose cross is also of course transformed in the sun’s center. Crowley describes his card’s sun as the fulfillment or development of the rosy cross for the new Aeon. From Book of Thoth:
“Gone are the four arms of a Cross limited by law; the creative energy of the Cross expands freely; its rays pierce in every direction the body of Our Lady of the Stars.”
Crowley writes extensively about the rosy cross in “Magick Without Tears” and elsewhere, as representing the essential alchemical formula of his favored“white school” of magick. This formula holds that if all the world is suffering and sorrow for the profane (in the profoundest sense as expounded by e.g. Schopenhauer), then the initiate has the means to transform it into joy: like a rose made to bloom on a barren cross. For more on this read Crowley’s three chapters on “the three schools of magick” in “Magick Without Tears”.
Crowley believed he had updated this formula for the new aeon through his motto “Do What Thou Wilt”. The relation of this affirmative formula to the sun card as described is easy enough to understand.
Attributes:
ר -- Resh— makes “r” sound in English, also rolling “r’s etc. Mean’s “head” or leader.
Attribution here makes sense in terms of “Ra”, Egyptian word for Sun and Solar deity, etymologically related to modern English words like “ray”. Remember that this is onomatopoeic: the high pitched sound emitted by rays… or what they seem at least to emit.
Ra did battle with Apophis: God of chaos. Remember the subtitle of Jordan Peterson’s Book 12 Rules For Life “an antidote for chaos”, and how people used to joke that BAP was the subtext to JBP and were entirely correct.
Numerical value: 200,
key scale: 30
Symbol: alchemical symbol of the sun:
Chris Gabriel Deck description of ideogram: “Burns The Eye, Leaves A Dark Spot”
--the third-eye point
--A spot of chaos within order, as in the Yin Yang.
English: Head
Position within the Tree Of Life:
Since this is the first time I am using the above figure, I will explain that the 10 sefirot of the Kabbalistic tree of life correspond to the 10, minor arcana pip cards in each suite, and the 22 “pathways” between these sefirot correspond to the 22 major arcana cards, each of which is ascribed a Hebrew letter.
The Sun— ר, Head, 200— finds itself as the pathway between HOD— הוֹד, “Splendor”—corresponding to Mercury and the eights of the tarot— and YESOD—יְסוֹד, “The Foundation”. More on these attributions later as I get into the pip cards.
Musical Reference Points:
“I used to think that the day would never come, when my life would depend on the morning sun”—New Order, “True Faith”, 1987
“There has to be an invisible sun. It gives its heat to everyone”—The Police , “Invisible Sun”, 1981
“Quicker than a Ray of Light”—Madonna, “Ray Of Light”, 1998
Video:
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Notes on Song selected:
One of the better tracks from the first album I ever bought. I bought it from iTunes on my Cyber-School issued laptop in late 2008, because it was the only MCR album I couldn’t check out from the library.
It’s still the least listened to MCR album, and without sounding like an annoying hipster about it: probably the one I like the best. The later more theatrical stuff just never was quite for me, and I dig this album as their only authentically post-hardcore album: a cool midway step between Misfits and Emo, showcasing Gerard Way’s horror/comic-book inspired lyrics in a less ostentatious way than their later theatrics.
Other good songs on this album include Skyline and Turnstiles (the first MCR song ever written, inspired by 911), and “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” inspired by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, though my memories of this song would later be marred by a performatively “suicidal” high-school girlfriend’s fixation on the lines “But does anyone notice? But does anyone care?... But does anyone notice there's a corpse in this bed?”
“Honey, this mirror isn’t big enough for the two of us” is also a good song a sort of inverse of the message of Johnny Cash’s Walk The Line.