Planetary attribution
The tarot cards of The Sun
Vitality, clarity and the self made visible.
The Sun takes its own trump and shares its attribution with cards about being seen, being warm and being unambiguous. It is the least equivocal body in the system: where the Moon obscures, the Sun states.
In the pips it lands on cards where something becomes plain, for better or worse. That includes the Ten of Swords, which is not a pleasant card and is entirely unambiguous, and the sun rising behind the figure is the one hopeful thing in the picture.
6 cards
The trump first, then the numbered cards that carry the same attribution.
The other planets
Where these attributions come from
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late nineteenth century. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was built on that system, which is why most modern decks still inherit it.
It is a system rather than a discovery. The fifteenth century Italian decks had no astrological scheme at all, and other traditions map the cards differently. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one, and where a card is disputed its own page says so.
The Sun in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to The Sun. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
The Sun on Memento Astra