The Sun Card and the Solstice for #TarotBlogHop
Solstice Alignment, by Shauna Aura Knight (Prints available on Redbubble)
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I somehow scored the Sun card on the Summer Solstice Tarot Blog Hop! I’ve always been fascinated by the solstices, even before I really understood what it was to be Pagan. I was obsessed with Druids and megaliths as a kid, and I even tried to track where the sun rose based on alignments from my window.
Before I look at the usual symbolism of a Tarot card, I like to go back in time before there was a Tarot deck, before the “established” esoteric and occult symbolism, to the source of what probably inspired a lot of those symbols in the first place.
People often talk about magic, and all the lost ancient knowledge, but a lot of “ancient magic” is stuff we can do on our cellphones these days. Thousands of years ago, it was magic to be able to track the cycles of the sun. To predict the equinoxes and solstices. Thousands of years ago, the “computer” was a stone alignment–With a pointer stone and a gateway or sight-line stone, you can tell when the sun has hit solstice.
Sol-stice means sun is standing still. The sun rises further and further north every day (in the Northern Hemisphere) until it stops. It will seem to rise in the same place for about three days, five if your alignment is a little loose, and then it’ll clearly start heading back south.
And on the winter solstice, the same. If you have two stones aligned, you can view it stand still, and then begin to return.
Why Were Calendars Magical?
For our ancient ancestors this kind of knowledge was crucial. We needed to know how much time we had left for the growing and harvest season. How long the winter would last. In modern times, that doesn’t really seem very magical. We just look at a calendar; we can see when the full moon and new moon are, the equinoxes, the solstices. We always know what time it is. Our phones give us the weather forecast. But remember when this was magic, when this was wisdom passed down from the witches/shamans/druids/priestesses/medicineworkers.
And similarly, the sun itself was seen as magic, as life force. In colder climates, the disappearance of the sun in winter means darkness and cold. And our ancient ancestors certainly knew that the energy of the sun was somehow connected to the growing season. Pretty easy connection there–sun = warmth = life force = growing = food = abundance.
Sun Goddess Painting by Shauna Aura Knight (Available on Etsy)
The Sun and Dualism
One challenge I have with the sun image in modern esoteric and occult knowledge is how it’s become part of an inherently dualistic system. I’ve written before about dualism, but in a nutshell, dualism is the philosophical/religious idea that there is good and bad. Nondualism is the belief that there is no good or evil, that things just are.
Dualism becomes a problem because people tend to shoehorn everything into an opposing black/white duality. This duality then ends up (unwittingly) serving misogyny, racism, and other discrimination.
Many of the esoteric systems that modern Tarot is built on are based in dualistic systems.
The Kabballah and alchemy frequently look at things in terms of sun and moon, male and female, light and dark, white and black, transcendance and manifestation, heaven and earth. That in itself isn’t “bad,” however, it’s the dualistic tendency to lump things into Yes/No Good/Bad that becomes problematic.
- Sun/male/active/Heaven/light/white/good
- Moon/female/passive/Earth/dark/black/bad
In fact, I’d have to say that one of my major beefs with modern occult and esoteric symbolism is that it sometimes oversymbolizes the symbol and warps it out of context.
Whenever I’m working with Tarot cards, or with anything that has a heap of occult and esoteric symbolic knowledge associated with it, I like to look at the cultural context of those symbols. If the sun is associated with maleness and “good,” and the moon or the earth is associated with femaleness and “bad,” that’s not really a set of symbols I want to be working with. At least, not in that way.
The Rising Sun, by Shauna Aura Knight
Return to the Source
In those instances, I like to go back to the source–the actual sun and its role in our year, in our lives. We depend on the sun for warmth, for the growing season, for everything we eat. When I was newly-come to Paganism I was very much into moon vs. sun, darkness, shadow…and I wore a lot of black…but eventually I came to reconnect with the sun itself, and to my own sunlight.
I just recently wrote an article for Eternal Haunted Summer on how I came to “reclaim my sunshine” as it were. I had always been shy, reclusive, but I wanted to become more. I wanted to learn to be a better leader, a better public speaker…but to do that I needed to be willing to shine. And I did.
It took a lot of personal and spiritual work.
The Sun is Outside, Not a Card
Connecting to the energies of the sun doesn’t necessarily require you to read a Tarot book, learn astrology, or become an expert in Kabballah. The Sun Card may be a piece of paper, and there may be plenty of books written about the symbolism, but the sun is outside. It’s in the sky. You can see the sunlight, feel it, almost smell it.
Go outside. Feel the sunlight on your skin. Think about how you respond to the sun during the course of the year. Is there a point during the winter when you crave the sunlight? Is there a point during the summer when the sun and heat are too much? Are there things you can only do during the daytime hours because you require the light? How do you feel when the sun sets, when the sun rises?
Can you hear how the animals around you respond to the sun? Where I live, the birds start their dawn song before the sun comes up.
Sun and the Tree of Life by Shauna Aura Knight
Sun and Science
I think that science and magic are inextricably linked. And yeah…maybe that takes some of the “magic’ out of it for some. Not for me. Knowing that a shooting star is a meteorite entering our atmosphere doesn’t make it any less cool. And knowing about the science of the sun doesn’t make that less cool either.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I begin to wonder how this amazing universe of ours even came to be…how our planet is somehow in that perfect distance from the sun where life can be sustained. How the reaction of the elements within the sun and the gravity strike the perfect balance that allows something like the sun to even exist. Stars, suns, supernovae, black holes…it’s all incredibly fascinating stuff.
Metaphysical Maps
I’m not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. The sun card is associated (among other things) with confidence, warmth, life force, abundance, vitality, power, energy, luck, wellness, enthusiasm, enlightenment, illumination, brilliance, joy, radiance. I don’t think that those are wrong.
It’s more that I believe we often confuse the metaphysical and cosmological models like astrology, Kabballah, and Tarot with the universe these models are trying to describe. There’s the saying, the map is not the terrain, and I think it applies here. Our ancestors came up with these models and they’ve served a purpose, and continue to serve. But don’t ever confuse the models, metaphors, and symbols for the terrain they describe.
The universe is a vast and deep place. It’s likely that in a few hundred years, the scientific models we use today to understand physics and subatomic particles and the stars will be just as scientifically archaic as alchemy is to modern chemistry. And our modern computers will be as outdated and clunky as the megalithic calendar computers our ancestors carved in stone.
And yet, metaphor and myth and symbol still have their place, still have their power. There’s a reason that our dreams speak to us in the language of symbol, that myths hold their potency after thousands of years. When we divorce science from spirit, when we separate out that deep mythic aspect, we lose a piece of ourselves.
What is the Sun?
The sun hasn’t changed. It’s still the rising light that burns away the morning mist, the life-giving radiance that gives us enough light to see and work, the warmth to melt the snow and bring the harvest to fruition. The sun still sets in amber-blood brilliance before the silence of the dark and the stars settle over us again.
If you’re working with the Sun card in the Tarot–or any card, for that matter–and you’re caught up in the esoteric symbolism, think for a moment about the symbol before the symbol. Think about how this symbol came to be. Think about how this symbol came to have all those trappings and associations. Think about what inspired the people who created the Tarot, who created astrology and kabballah and alchemy. Think about whether or not those symbols and correspondences fit your values and your work.
And then let the sun itself inspire you.
Note: Artwork and illustrations above are available on my Etsy and Redbubble pages. See other examples of my work here on my blog. 15% off sale code JUNE2015 on Etsy.
Continue on the Tarot Blog hop:
PREVIOUS BLOG | MASTER LIST | NEXT BLOG
Filed under: Magic, Personal Growth Tagged: #tarotbloghop, archaeoastronomy, megaliths, Personal growth, solstice, solstices, summer solstice, sun, sun card, Tarot
The Sun Card and the Solstice for #TarotBlogHop
Solstice Alignment, by Shauna Aura Knight (Prints available on Redbubble)
PREVIOUS BLOG | MASTER LIST | NEXT BLOG
I somehow scored the Sun card on the Summer Solstice Tarot Blog Hop! I’ve always been fascinated by the solstices, even before I really understood what it was to be Pagan. I was obsessed with Druids and megaliths as a kid, and I even tried to track where the sun rose based on alignments from my window.
Before I look at the usual symbolism of a Tarot card, I like to go back in time before there was a Tarot deck, before the “established” esoteric and occult symbolism, to the source of what probably inspired a lot of those symbols in the first place.
People often talk about magic, and all the lost ancient knowledge, but a lot of “ancient magic” is stuff we can do on our cellphones these days. Thousands of years ago, it was magic to be able to track the cycles of the sun. To predict the equinoxes and solstices. Thousands of years ago, the “computer” was a stone alignment–With a pointer stone and a gateway or sight-line stone, you can tell when the sun has hit solstice.
Sol-stice means sun is standing still. The sun rises further and further north every day (in the Northern Hemisphere) until it stops. It will seem to rise in the same place for about three days, five if your alignment is a little loose, and then it’ll clearly start heading back south.
And on the winter solstice, the same. If you have two stones aligned, you can view it stand still, and then begin to return.
Why Were Calendars Magical?
For our ancient ancestors this kind of knowledge was crucial. We needed to know how much time we had left for the growing and harvest season. How long the winter would last. In modern times, that doesn’t really seem very magical. We just look at a calendar; we can see when the full moon and new moon are, the equinoxes, the solstices. We always know what time it is. Our phones give us the weather forecast. But remember when this was magic, when this was wisdom passed down from the witches/shamans/druids/priestesses/medicineworkers.
And similarly, the sun itself was seen as magic, as life force. In colder climates, the disappearance of the sun in winter means darkness and cold. And our ancient ancestors certainly knew that the energy of the sun was somehow connected to the growing season. Pretty easy connection there–sun = warmth = life force = growing = food = abundance.
Sun Goddess Painting by Shauna Aura Knight (Available on Etsy)
The Sun and Dualism
One challenge I have with the sun image in modern esoteric and occult knowledge is how it’s become part of an inherently dualistic system. I’ve written before about dualism, but in a nutshell, dualism is the philosophical/religious idea that there is good and bad. Nondualism is the belief that there is no good or evil, that things just are.
Dualism becomes a problem because people tend to shoehorn everything into an opposing black/white duality. This duality then ends up (unwittingly) serving misogyny, racism, and other discrimination.
Many of the esoteric systems that modern Tarot is built on are based in dualistic systems.
The Kabballah and alchemy frequently look at things in terms of sun and moon, male and female, light and dark, white and black, transcendance and manifestation, heaven and earth. That in itself isn’t “bad,” however, it’s the dualistic tendency to lump things into Yes/No Good/Bad that becomes problematic.
- Sun/male/active/Heaven/light/white/good
- Moon/female/passive/Earth/dark/black/bad
In fact, I’d have to say that one of my major beefs with modern occult and esoteric symbolism is that it sometimes oversymbolizes the symbol and warps it out of context.
Whenever I’m working with Tarot cards, or with anything that has a heap of occult and esoteric symbolic knowledge associated with it, I like to look at the cultural context of those symbols. If the sun is associated with maleness and “good,” and the moon or the earth is associated with femaleness and “bad,” that’s not really a set of symbols I want to be working with. At least, not in that way.
The Rising Sun, by Shauna Aura Knight
Return to the Source
In those instances, I like to go back to the source–the actual sun and its role in our year, in our lives. We depend on the sun for warmth, for the growing season, for everything we eat. When I was newly-come to Paganism I was very much into moon vs. sun, darkness, shadow…and I wore a lot of black…but eventually I came to reconnect with the sun itself, and to my own sunlight.
I just recently wrote an article for Eternal Haunted Summer on how I came to “reclaim my sunshine” as it were. I had always been shy, reclusive, but I wanted to become more. I wanted to learn to be a better leader, a better public speaker…but to do that I needed to be willing to shine. And I did.
It took a lot of personal and spiritual work.
The Sun is Outside, Not a Card
Connecting to the energies of the sun doesn’t necessarily require you to read a Tarot book, learn astrology, or become an expert in Kabballah. The Sun Card may be a piece of paper, and there may be plenty of books written about the symbolism, but the sun is outside. It’s in the sky. You can see the sunlight, feel it, almost smell it.
Go outside. Feel the sunlight on your skin. Think about how you respond to the sun during the course of the year. Is there a point during the winter when you crave the sunlight? Is there a point during the summer when the sun and heat are too much? Are there things you can only do during the daytime hours because you require the light? How do you feel when the sun sets, when the sun rises?
Can you hear how the animals around you respond to the sun? Where I live, the birds start their dawn song before the sun comes up.
Sun and the Tree of Life by Shauna Aura Knight
Sun and Science
I think that science and magic are inextricably linked. And yeah…maybe that takes some of the “magic’ out of it for some. Not for me. Knowing that a shooting star is a meteorite entering our atmosphere doesn’t make it any less cool. And knowing about the science of the sun doesn’t make that less cool either.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I begin to wonder how this amazing universe of ours even came to be…how our planet is somehow in that perfect distance from the sun where life can be sustained. How the reaction of the elements within the sun and the gravity strike the perfect balance that allows something like the sun to even exist. Stars, suns, supernovae, black holes…it’s all incredibly fascinating stuff.
Metaphysical Maps
I’m not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. The sun card is associated (among other things) with confidence, warmth, life force, abundance, vitality, power, energy, luck, wellness, enthusiasm, enlightenment, illumination, brilliance, joy, radiance. I don’t think that those are wrong.
It’s more that I believe we often confuse the metaphysical and cosmological models like astrology, Kabballah, and Tarot with the universe these models are trying to describe. There’s the saying, the map is not the terrain, and I think it applies here. Our ancestors came up with these models and they’ve served a purpose, and continue to serve. But don’t ever confuse the models, metaphors, and symbols for the terrain they describe.
The universe is a vast and deep place. It’s likely that in a few hundred years, the scientific models we use today to understand physics and subatomic particles and the stars will be just as scientifically archaic as alchemy is to modern chemistry. And our modern computers will be as outdated and clunky as the megalithic calendar computers our ancestors carved in stone.
And yet, metaphor and myth and symbol still have their place, still have their power. There’s a reason that our dreams speak to us in the language of symbol, that myths hold their potency after thousands of years. When we divorce science from spirit, when we separate out that deep mythic aspect, we lose a piece of ourselves.
What is the Sun?
The sun hasn’t changed. It’s still the rising light that burns away the morning mist, the life-giving radiance that gives us enough light to see and work, the warmth to melt the snow and bring the harvest to fruition. The sun still sets in amber-blood brilliance before the silence of the dark and the stars settle over us again.
If you’re working with the Sun card in the Tarot–or any card, for that matter–and you’re caught up in the esoteric symbolism, think for a moment about the symbol before the symbol. Think about how this symbol came to be. Think about how this symbol came to have all those trappings and associations. Think about what inspired the people who created the Tarot, who created astrology and kabballah and alchemy. Think about whether or not those symbols and correspondences fit your values and your work.
And then let the sun itself inspire you.
Note: Artwork and illustrations above are available on my Etsy and Redbubble pages. See other examples of my work here on my blog. 15% off sale code JUNE2015 on Etsy.
Continue on the Tarot Blog hop:
PREVIOUS BLOG | MASTER LIST | NEXT BLOG
Filed under: Magic, Personal Growth Tagged: #tarotbloghop, archaeoastronomy, megaliths, Personal growth, solstice, solstices, summer solstice, sun, sun card, Tarot
Excerpt from A Mantle of Stars
A Mantle of Stars: A Devotional for the Queen of Heaven
I’m very excited to announce the publication of an anthology featuring one of my essays. I’ve included a few brief excerpts from my essay, and I’m really excited to read all of the other pieces. The anthology is edited by Jen McConnel and published by Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
About the Book:
Peel back the layers that comprise the Queen of Heaven. She is Mother Mary weeping at the cross, and Hathor dancing in the sky. She is Freyja with her wild eyes, and Frigg with her open arms. She is Yemaya, keeper of the sea; compassionate Kuan Yin; and she is winged Isis. Her starry body stretches across the sky in the guise of Nut, and she is Saraswati’s gentle song. She is Juno, and Hera, and Tanit, and a thousand forgotten names, and she is Inanna, descending to the underworld to be reborn.
The voices in this anthology are as diverse as the different goddesses who have claimed the title Queen of Heaven, but each sparkles like the stars in Our Lady’s mantle.
Excerpt from A Mantle of Stars:
Below are a number of short excerpts taken from my longer essay. Think of them as stones skipping on a pond; little glimpses in a basically linear flow.
My Path to the Lady in the Blue Light
–Shauna Aura Knight
“I didn’t know her name. I started talking to her at night, talking to that huge bright moon, to the glittering stars. I think I was twelve when I started pouring out my sorrows to her. I was young enough that everything was emotionally overwhelming. Old enough to understand that people were cruel, that my classmates were cruel, and that they were never, ever going to stop teasing me. I think it was around that age that I started wondering, every once in a while, if life was worth living if every day meant verbal, emotional, and sometimes physical torture at the hands of my peers.
Somehow, at night when I looked up at the moon, I felt that she was with me. Angel, goddess, I didn’t know….Feeling her close made me feel like I was worth something, like maybe life was worth surviving….”
***
“In my twenties, the dreams changed. The visions were harder to connect to, further and farther between. I began to dream less of the angel/goddess directly, and more of something I first called the Water Chapel, later, the Water Temple. In this Temple of the Goddess of moonlight and water, there were spiral grooves carved into the floor, sometimes carvings of water shapes and grails almost in the way the ramps up to the Forbidden City in China are carved in relief. There was always a fountain in the center, water falling down, or a grail overflowing.”
***
“When I joined the leadership program at Diana’s Grove, my intention was to learn the skills to help serve Pagan community, but also to be a better leader in order to accomplish some of the larger creative projects I had in mind, some of those being projects like building standing stones, temples, or something more mundane like art installations. I knew I had been called to Pagan leadership, and I knew that Diana’s Grove was one of the very few places where I could actually get the training to do it.
But as I began doing that work of learning Pagan leadership and priestess skills, it felt like my Goddess was further and further away from me. Those moments of divine communion seemed a thousand miles out of reach.”
***
“I’ve been reading about sacred geometry, ancient temples, and ancient legends for a while, but it seemed like suddenly the synchronicities were coming faster. Michael and Gabriel, sword and chalice. There also seemed to frequently be a connection between the Grail and the cosmic mountain or Omphalos—world navel—and at times, a connection to the dome of the heavens, the zodiac.”
***
“Archaeoastronomy is still considered fringe science to some, although I personally find the evidence fairly compelling that our ancient ancestors built computers in the form of stone megaliths and temples to track the movement of the stars and the heavens. As a kid I had those dreams about Stonehenge all the time, and for a while I thought about just building stone circles, but it wasn’t until I learned more about the actual solar and stellar alignments of some of the megaliths that it began to make sense why our ancestors might have done that kind of work. And perhaps, why I myself might have become obsessed with the idea without even knowing why.”
***
“I believe that our ancient ancestors understood the sky. And for whatever reason, they knew that it was essential to chart the stars, to record their observations in stone. It’s relatively easy to track the solstices and equinoxes, which would be essential for tracking the seasons. But some of these sites seem to have tracked incredibly complicated stellar phenomena. Eclipses, the 8-year and 40-year cycle of Venus. Even the 25,800 -year cycle of axial precession caused by the slight wobble of the Earth’s rotation on its axis.”
***
“Queen of Heaven, Venus, and Astronomical Megaliths
With a dozen wooden posts and a flat field, our priest-astronomer-megalith builders could have tracked the simple seasonal cycles. One post goes in the center as a sightline. You start at the Equinox, and put a post on one half of the circle for sunrise, one for sunset. Over the next months, you track the sun as it moves north, putting another post in to mark the sightline for the solstice. Solstice means “sun is standing still,” so you mark the northernmost sunrise of the summer solstice, and the northernmost sunset on the other side of your circle. Same thing for the latter half of the year, marking out the sunset. That calendar takes just one year to build and is fairly tolerant of error.”***
“The truth is, I think a great deal of the “magic” of our ancient ancestors can be found in a modern cell phone: calendars, moon phases, a compass. Imagine the power that the shaman-priests had by being able to tell when the solstices and equinoxes fell. By knowing when the warm rains would come, when the snows would come, when it was time to plant. This knowledge was carried in the language of stone, in the language of myth.”
***
“My search began with the dreams, with visions of an unnamed goddess. Later, dreams of megaliths, dreams of temples filled with water and with images of a Grail, temples filled with spiral grooves, temples where water was always flowing, and where I felt connected to that goddess of the nighttime sky. In those dreams and visions, I felt completely connected to her, transcendent.
And yet, in my quest to follow the path I saw to spiritual leadership, and the path to learn more about labyrinths and temples, I seemed to have lost her….When I began leading public rituals, I thought surely I would find that place of communion, and it eluded me over and over.
….For years, I felt a bitterness. How unfair was it that I finally understood some of the messages from my dreams, even if they were vague, and I couldn’t actually directly commune with this goddess that had inspired me and kept me from harming myself in my youth?”
***
“In my vision, I felt myself become a part of the entire universe. The universe was an ocean of love; I was laying on a bed that was the waters of the ocean that was the mother that loves us all and that is all of us, that we are not separate from. It was my goddess, but warmer, larger, more encompassing.
I felt the golden honey-light of the heartbreak of the universe breaking open on my skin in that moment, I felt the cradling rocking loving. That I was not separate from the divine. That indeed, I was not separate from anyone, that we were like water in the ocean, that the skin that separates us is an illusion. That it was all bliss and agony and love together—that the separation the universe must endure from us is agony, but only with that grief and loss can we truly recognize how potent it is to come home again….”
Table of Contents and more information at:
http://neosalexandria.org/bibliotheca-alexandrina/current-titles/a-mantle-of-stars-a-devotional-for-the-queen-of-heaven/
Edited by: Jen McConnel
Published by: Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Price: $14.99
Publication Date: 20 December 2013
ISBN: 978-1494357948 / 1494357941
Pages: 302 pp
Purchase at:
https://www.createspace.com/4553772
http://www.amazon.com/Mantle-Stars-Devotional-Queen-Heaven/dp/1494357941
Filed under: Dreamwork, Personal Growth Tagged: A Mantle of Stars, archaeoastronomy, Archangel Gabriel, Arthur, Gabriel, Goddess, king arthur, megaliths, Personal growth, personal transformation, Quest for the Grail, stonehenge, Sword in the Stone, the Grail, trance journey, transformation
