The Sun

What the Sun stands for

In a chart the Sun stands for who a person is being: the part that wants to be recognised, and what they are making of themselves. It is the body most people mean when they say their sign.

Older astrology calls the Sun and the Moon the two lights, and gives the Sun vitality, standing and purpose, along with the people a person looks up to or answers to: the father, the employer, whoever holds authority. Modern writers read it more psychologically, as a sense of self that is grown into over a life rather than finished at birth. Both readings treat it as the centre the rest of the chart is organised around.

How the Sun moves

It goes once round the zodiac in a year, a little under a degree a day and about thirty days in each sign. Seen from the Earth it never appears to go backwards.

It is not a planet at all. The old word meant anything that wandered against the fixed stars, and the Sun and the Moon were simply the brightest wanderers.

Its pace is not even. The Earth is nearest the Sun in early January and furthest in early July, so the Sun takes about twenty-nine and a half days to cross Capricorn and about thirty-one and a half to cross Cancer. Its arrivals in Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn are the equinoxes and solstices, which is why the year can be drawn as one wheel of seasons and signs.

Because the tropical zodiac is counted from the March equinox, the Sun is in the same sign on the same dates every year, give or take a day, and its solar return, the minute it comes back to its birth degree, falls on the birthday or the day beside it.

Rulership, dignity and sect

The Sun rules Leo.

It is exalted in Aries, at nineteen degrees by the old reckoning, and so has its fall in Libra, the opposite sign; its detriment is Aquarius, opposite Leo. Those placements are the tradition’s shorthand for where a planet has the most and the least room to act in its own way, and the dignities page scores them across a whole chart.

The Sun leads the day sect: a chart is a day chart when the Sun was above the horizon at birth, and Jupiter and Saturn are then said to be in sect. It is not called a benefic or a malefic. Instead, planets close to it are said to be under its beams, and within about eight and a half degrees combust, lost in its glare, while a planet within about seventeen minutes of arc of its centre is called cazimi, in the heart of the Sun, and read as strengthened. Its joy, the house the Hellenistic astrologers thought it most at home in, is the ninth, which they called the house of the god.

Reading the Sun by sign and by house

By sign, the Sun is read as the manner of a person’s self-expression: in Aries the tone of someone starting things, in Capricorn the tone of someone building for the long term. By house, it is read as the part of life where a person most wants to be seen doing well. The house needs a birth time, which is why the birth chart asks for one, and the aspects other planets make to the Sun are read as what that self has to work with or against.

A worked example: the Sun in Virgo in the tenth house is read as a sense of self tied up with public work and being good at it, carried out with Virgo’s attention to method and detail. The same Sun in the fourth house moves that emphasis to home, family and private life. The sign says how, the house says where.

What gets confused about the Sun

A Sun sign is only one of three placements most readings start from. The Moon sign is read as the emotional side and the rising sign as the manner a person meets the world with, and between them they often explain why somebody does not feel like a typical member of their Sun sign.

Nobody is born on the cusp in the sense of being half of two signs. The Sun is always at a particular degree of one sign, and the moment it moves on shifts by some hours from year to year, so somebody born near a change needs the year, the time and the place of birth to settle it. The Leo page describes the sign the tradition gives the Sun as its own.