☉ Sun

Sun is the core self of the chart. It governs identity, vitality and purpose.

Sun at a glance

• ArchetypeThe Core Self
• Governsidentity, vitality and purpose
• RulesLeo
• Cycle1 year
• Keywordsself, will, vitality, purpose
• In the bodythe heart and spine

What Sun means

The Sun is not your personality. It is what you are becoming, which is a slower and more demanding thing than a description.

Every other body in the chart is measured in relation to it: how far from it, on which side, visible or lost in its light. That is not symbolism. It is what a solar system is, and the chart inherited the arrangement.

Where your Sun sits is where the life gets spent. It answers what the effort was for, and it is usually clearer to somebody at fifty than at twenty.

When Sun is the hard part

It is the placement most easily mistaken for the whole of you, and the mistake is expensive in both directions: it flatters a life that is going well and it indicts one that is not.

It is also the slowest to arrive. Nobody is finished being their Sun sign, and the people who sound most like theirs at twenty-five are usually describing their Ascendant.

Its cycle, and the ages it lands on

One year to go round, which is why a birthday is a return: the Sun arriving back at the exact degree it held when you were born. That is the moment a solar return chart is cast for, and it rarely lands on the hour you were born, or even always on the same date.

It is the only cycle in the chart that everybody already observes without being told it is astrology.

Can you see it?

You can see it every day and you must not look at it. It is the one body here where the honest instruction is not to observe it directly.

Everything else is measured against it. A planet close to the Sun in longitude is lost in the glare and rises or sets near it, which is where the old idea of a planet being combust comes from. The tradition was describing visibility before it was describing anything else.

What retrograde actually is

The Sun never goes retrograde, and neither does the Moon. Retrograde is what you see when the Earth's own motion makes another body appear to slide backwards against the stars, and the Sun's apparent motion is the Earth's orbit itself. There is nothing to overtake.

Which makes it the one body in the chart that has never once changed its mind.

Sun also touches

the father, leaders, gold, where you shine, what you're here to become.

A question to sit with

Where do you feel most alive, and are you letting yourself be seen there?