The Sun

Sol, the radiant face

Gold, the perfected metal, and the illuminated intellect. The most overloaded symbol in the tradition.

Sixty works in this archive carry the sun, and the voices that speak for it do not mean the same thing by it. That disagreement is the entry. The moon shares most of these pictures and almost none of these meanings, and has an entry of its own.

For Manly P. Hall, writing under his own plate in 1928, the sun on the middle fingertip of the Hand of the Mysteries is “the luminescence of creation through which man may learn the mystery of all creatures which express through form and number”. It is a light to read the world by. The seventeenth-century Hand of the Philosophers, which this archive files under Hollandus and which the record says is disputed as to authorship, does not treat it as a light at all. There the sun is a substance, sal ammoniac, ranked in the work below saltpetre and vitriol and above nothing else; those are the archive's words for it, not his, because what we hold is a reading of the text and not a quotation from it. The same glyph, the same finger, the same lineage of pictures, and one reading means illumination while the other means a salt that could be bought by the pound. The Encyclopédie's table of 1763 sides with the chemists without argument: the sign of the sun stands there for gold, Or, and the plate's rule is that “Le nom de la chose est à côté du caractere qui la désigne”, the name of the thing is beside the character that denotes it.

For Robert Fludd in 1617 the sun is a god, with a qualification he is careful to make: “Solem naturae DEUM, sed creatum”, the Sun, the god of nature but a created one, which receives all its light from God and passes it down, so that the earth “eandem cum Sole correspondentiam, quam habet Sol cum DEO excelsissimo”, stands in the same correspondence to the Sun as the Sun does to God most high. Hall, captioning Fludd's monochord three centuries later, puts it in a sentence: “The sun is the lower octave of the highest heaven and the earth the lower octave of the sun.” On the mirror of nature Fludd hangs the sun on the breast of Nature herself, “vera Solis coelestis sedes matrixque”, the true seat and womb of the heavenly Sun, with the moon in her belly. Kircher's plate sets the sun's sign on Tiphereth, the sixth circle at the centre of his tree, and his chapter lists “ortus solis”, the rising of the sun, among its attributes: it is, he says, “Causa est omnis harmoniae & pulchritudinis, quam in vniuerso intuemur”, the cause of all the harmony and beauty we behold in the universe.

For A. E. Waite in 1911 the sun is consciousness itself, “the direct as the antithesis of the reflected light”. His Sun card is a passage out of one world into another: “The card signifies, therefore, the transit from the manifest light of this world, represented by the glorious sun of earth, to the light of the world to come, which goes before aspiration and is typified by the heart of a child.” And he is exact, as he usually is, about which part of the picture is old: “The luminary is distinguished in older cards by chief rays that are waved and salient alternately and by secondary salient rays.” The reflected light he is measuring his sun against is the moon's, and the sentence he wrote under it is quoted where it belongs.

Maier's sun of 1618 is a substance before it is a light, and across the fifty emblems it seldom acts alone. It is whitened with its sister in their mother Latona; it rises at the left of the forty-seventh; and in the forty-fifth its own shadow finishes the work, “Sol & ejus umbra perficiunt opus”. The thirtieth emblem states the dependence outright and gives the line to the moon rather than to him, which is why it is quoted on her page and not on his. In the alchemists' book the sun is one of two things in a vessel, and the argument between them is the work.

Dee's Monas of 1564 makes the two lights the head of one sign: a crescent whose horns hold a circle with a point at its centre, standing on the cross of the elements and the sign of Aries. His eleventh theorem letters the parts “Luna. Sol. Elementa. Ignis.” and gives the rule, “Monadis istius, Luna et Sol, sua separari volunt elementa, in quibus denaria vigebit proportio; idque ignis fieri ministerio.”, that the Moon and the Sun of this Monad wish their elements to be separated, and that this be done by the ministry of fire; the fourteenth says where the pair comes from, “Ex Sole et Luna, totum hoc pendere Magisterium iam clare confirmatum est.”, that this whole mastery hangs from the Sun and the Moon. Khunrath cut the sentence of Hermes that stands behind that claim into his rock in 1609, and on his title set the sun over the obelisk of prayer and the moon over the obelisk of work with “Sol. Luna.” lettered at their feet; on his plate of the Name the sun at the centre has Christ standing in it, with “In hoc signo vinces.” round the rim. For Dee the two lights are the top of a glyph; for Khunrath they are the two posts of a door and, once, the place where God became a man.

And in the Apocalypse the sun is neither meaning nor matter but clothing. “A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” Dürer cut that sentence into wood in 1511 and Denis Molinier painted it again in 1772, both working from the same words.

A light, a salt, a metal, a created god, a married pair, a state of mind and a garment, across four centuries of one picture-language. The archive does not choose between them. It shows you which is which, and who said so.

Contested

The alchemical sun and the astrological sun are not obviously the same sun, and nothing this archive holds settles it. The Hand of the Philosophers is talking about a material in a vessel; Hall is talking about a faculty of mind; Fludd about a body in the sky that is also a god; Waite about a state of consciousness. Whether these are uses of one symbol or several symbols wearing one face is a real question and no source here answers it.

Two of the readings are also flagged in the record rather than settled. Hall's caption is a transcription that has not yet been read against the printed 1928 page. The Hand of the Philosophers reaches us through Leone Muller's English of 1986, not yet read against a seventeenth-century printing, and the authorship of the Hollandus texts is disputed. Neither is quoted here as though it were certain. Fludd's and Kircher's Latin and the Encyclopédie's French are put into English by the archive, with the originals on the records; Lévi is quoted in Waite's translation of 1896. Dee's and Khunrath's Latin is read off their pages and put into English by the archive, with the originals on the records.

Where a work in this archive carries the sun and nobody has read it, the mark says so. The sun and moon painted in the corners of Knapp's Abraxas are the standing example: Hall's own caption reads the figure and never names them, so they are recorded as observed and left unread. So are the signs of the sun and moon cut on Agrippa's man in the pentagram, which his chapter does not name.

Sources

Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928: The plate caption to the Hand of the Mysteries. Transcribed, not yet read against the printed page.
Hollandus, attributed, The Hand of the Philosophers, 17th c.: Through Leone Muller's English translation, RAMS, 1986. Not yet read against a seventeenth-century printing, and the authorship of the Hollandus texts is disputed.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911: Part II, on the Sun and the Moon of the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith.
The Apocalypse of Saint John, Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision: Chapter 12, verse 1, the woman clothed with the sun. Quoted from the Challoner text, checked verse by verse against the printed edition.
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi historia, 1617: The explanation of the mirror of nature and the chapter on the music of the world in the first tractate, Oppenheim 1617, read in the Latin of the Getty Research Institute copy with the archive's English beside it.
Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1653: The paragraph on Tiphereth in the chapter on the Cabala of the Hebrews, Rome 1653, read in the Latin of the Universidad de Sevilla copy with the archive's English beside it.
The Encyclopédie, Recueil de planches, volume III, Chimie, 1763: The second plate of chemical characters and the sentence from its explanation that says how the table is to be read.
Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie: The description of the frontispiece in the fifteenth chapter of the Rituel, quoted in Waite's translation of 1896 and checked against the 1861 French printing.
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618: The mottoes and epigrams of the fifty emblems, Oppenheim 1618, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's own and is marked as such on every record. Maier's discourses, in which he explains each emblem at length, are not yet transcribed.
John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica, 1564: The lettering of the figures and the theorems beside them in the Frankfurt printing of 1591, read off the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's.
Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, 1609: The lettering of the plates of the Amphitheatrum, Hanau 1609, read off the page images of the Wellcome and Paris copies at the size of the archive's own images; the Hebrew and Greek are given in transliteration and the English is the archive's.