The Sun

Correspondences

Number

XIX

Hebrew letter

ר Resh, “Head, face” (value 200)

Attribution

☉︎ Sun

Golden Dawn title

The Lord of the Fire of the World

Thoth

The Sun

Marseille

Le Soleil

Case’s key word

Regeneration

Path on the Tree

The 30th path, joining Hod and Yesod

The letter

Resh, the head or face, is the principle of beginnings: rosh, head; reshit, beginning. Its value is 200. It is a Double letter; in Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Peace and War.

On the Tree

The 30th path joins Hod to Yesod: the light of the Sun shining into the mind and the astral world. The 32 Paths calls it the Collecting Intelligence, the path of astrologers. The Practicus grade includes it.

The Sun in the Waite deck

Smith’s Sun shows a naked child, crowned with flowers and a red feather, riding a white horse in front of a wall of sunflowers, carrying a great red banner, under a huge sun with a face. Waite calls it “the destiny of the Supernatural East and the great and holy light”; Case’s key word is regeneration: the new creature, freed from the old personality.

The Sun in the Thoth deck

Harris’s Sun is a great twelve-rayed disc over a green mound surrounded by a wall. Two winged children dance on the mound, the twins of the new aeon (Horus and Harpocrates), and the twelve signs of the zodiac ring the card. A rose is at the centre of the sun. Crowley calls it the Lord of the New Aeon, the Crowned and Conquering Child, and says that the wall around the mound shows that humanity’s liberation is still to be completed.