Sun

Meaning

The Sun is the star the Earth travels around. Seen from here it crosses the twelve signs in a year, so its sign at birth follows from the birthday. Astrology counts it among the planets in the old sense, the lights that wander against the fixed stars, and with the Moon calls it one of the two luminaries.

In a chart it stands for identity, vitality and purpose: the will that gathers the personality around it, and what someone wants to become and be recognised for. Modern astrologers read it less as a finished character than as a direction to grow into.

Tradition gives it the day. It leads the diurnal sect, rules Leo and is exalted in Aries, and it is least at ease in Aquarius, its detriment, and Libra, its fall. It signified honour, rank and the father.

Its gifts are warmth, confidence, generosity and the courage to be seen. Its difficulties come from the same light turned up too high, as pride or a need for applause, or, when the Sun is under strain, from a hesitation to take up any room at all.

In practice

• The Sun sign is what magazines call a star sign. Its change dates shift by a day or so between years, so a birthday at the edge of a sign needs the year and the time.
• Its house shows where recognition is sought: in the 10th, through work and a public role; in the 4th, through home and family.
• Planets in aspect to it colour how the self is expressed: Saturn often brings a confidence built slowly, Jupiter an easy optimism.
• Close to the Sun, within 8°, a planet is combust, taken into its glare; within 17′ it is cazimi, “in the heart of the Sun”, and read as strengthened.
• Around each birthday the Sun returns to its birth degree, the moment astrologers use for the solar return, a chart of the year ahead.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology calls it Surya and works in the sidereal zodiac, now about 24° from the tropical one: a Sun in the first three weeks or so of a tropical sign falls in the previous sign there.
• Chinese astronomy makes the Sun, 日 rì, yang to the Moon’s yin, and cuts its yearly path into 24 solar terms of 15° each. BaZi’s year begins at Lìchūn, the Start of Spring, when the Sun reaches 315°.
• Human Design gives the Sun about 70% of the imprint: its gate is the central theme, and the lines of the two Suns make the profile.

Origin and history

Mesopotamia knew the Sun as Shamash, god of justice, Greece as Helios, and Rome as Sol, whose day, dies Solis, became Sunday. Hellenistic astrologers such as Vettius Valens and Claudius Ptolemy made it the leader of the day sect and the significator of the father and of rank, a frame kept down to William Lilly. Copernicus set it at the centre of the planets in 1543, but astrology kept the view from the Earth, since a chart is the sky as seen from one place.

The Sun sign became the popular face of astrology in the twentieth century: after R. H. Naylor’s horoscope for a newborn princess in the Sunday Express in 1930, newspaper columns built on the twelve Sun signs spread through the 1930s.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the Sun from the Swiss Ephemeris, built on NASA JPL’s DE441 and covering 600 BC to AD 2400: its apparent longitude seen from the centre of the Earth, in the tropical zodiac, at the birth moment read with the birthplace’s full time-zone history.

The Sun also settles the chart’s sect. A birth counts as by day when the Sun’s centre stands above the true horizon, as on the chart’s own horizon line, so in the minutes around sunrise and sunset the verdict can differ from the Sun you would see. It decides which planets are in sect and how the Part of Fortune is worked out. Every planet from the Moon to Pluto is marked combust within 8° of the Sun and cazimi within 17′. Without a birth time the chart is cast at local noon and the sect is marked uncertain.

Correspondences