The Sun

This is perhaps the simplest card in the deck, and certainly the happiest. Waite took Eliphas Levi’s suggestion and turned away from the image of two children playing, which had been canon since the Marseille tarot, replacing them with a single child astride a white horse, sporting a red scarf. This was a mistake, and it’s not even worth a short discussion. The card should depict two naked children, who should perhaps be far enough into puberty to make you start to question either the appropriateness of the depiction or that of your own cultural attitudes. Just for your edification, these kids have already been playing doctor for years now, and are still innocent. They are simply better informed than most cultures would want them to be. As with the Star, having nothing to hide is a virtue. Transparency and sunshine laws are two ways that we have adopted this in our saner cultural structures. We have other names for the virtue of shedding light on things, like candor, frankness, sincerity, honesty, disclosure, discovery, xediantropia, parrhesia, openness, and glasnost. Sunshine or sunlight is also the greatest antiseptic, a purifying as well as an organizing force. In both of these senses, and in both mental and physical realms, it will mean better health. The light will clean, dispel, purge, flush out, burn off, purify, revitalize, regenerate, and reorganize what is failing for want of robustness, resilience, and energy. The sun gods are always the healers, at least the healers who don’t need to study techniques, for whom health is the natural state. We are all taught that energy is conserved in its many transformations from one form into another, and this card depicts the excitement of these transformations. Where these happen, we have the possibilities of self-organization, like negative entropy and life, for example, or energy that is learning. It is not the case that sunshine is the sole source of energy for all of life on Earth: there are other tellurian and chemical forces, and nuclear energy deep in the core. But sunshine powers most of our plant and animal life. Sunshine gets locked up in sugars by plants, and sugars are used to make structures, cellulose, and alcohols used to make lignin. When any of these catch fire, the light and heat that come out is the same old sunlight that first went in, now getting free again. One of the ways to catch fire is our metabolism, and one of the manifestations of this is the energy used in the nerves, that lights up our minds as the process called conscious- ness. This is sunlight become aware. It may then become aware of itself or remain in flow, spontaneous and unselfconscious. The sense that we have of ourselves is none other than sunshine itself, in the process of moving on, still journeying into the night. This is not what was meant in Isaiah 40:6 by “All flesh is grass,” but we can still use this for that. But it is what was meant in the Zhouyi by “attending the cow is good fortune,” as this is the chapter of Li and the Sun. The cow will become our awareness as the log becomes our fire. Light is food and food is light. We gather the light and store it in our fuel and potential. We depend on our sources and causes for what we are to become. We charge matter up with the light. We slow the light down so it stays put until we need it. This is the core of material and material- ism. It’s not a thing to be flown from, or a thing for angels to escape, but more of a thing to be cared for. We don’t love and respect our matter enough. This moment that they say is all that really is, is only our minds catching fire, lighting matter back up. We and our moments are fountainheads of light. We don’t seem to celebrate this as well or as often as the flame that dances around on the log, released at last from its colder and lowlier states. This point of release is all that we really have or are, as the rest is still asleep and unaware, just another part of the material world at large. Life is as good as it gets when we’re setting lots of light free. We call this by many names: zest, brio, elan, exuberance, enthusiasm, play, living it up, vivacity, vitality, vibrancy, fun in the sun, high spirits, enlightenment, and lightheartedness. Even post-pubescent old folks can have this. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this moment is that this is the only time that we can choose where the light will go next. Radiation, by definition, is moving outward, emerging, evolving, diverging, opening up to the options, rising up and outward. To stand out is what ‘exist’ means. Light, having learned, learns to keep learning. It does this by choosing a direction and having an experience, and then experiencing the consequences of choosing that direction. It’s quite a system. By this it gets ever more lucid and clear, brighter and better informed. Some of humanity’s gravest errors come from interfering or intervening with this process while thinking that we already know best. This is the whole point of liberty or freedom, this moving point of choice that we have. We learn by doing, and learn much less by being told what and what not to do. Herbert Spencer wrote, “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” We need the authority to act, the sovereignty, dignity, autonomy, license, and freedom to act, and then we need, every bit as much, both the courage to face the consequences and an inability to deny or look away from those consequences. Human is as human does, so we only get better by learning how to do better. This is a card of Liberty.