We need the Sun to feel authentic.  Without a conscious connection to our solar energy, we never feel  ‘grown up.’  Any planet aspecting the Sun has to be a part of the basic identity.  Sun/Pluto, you have to come to terms with power and how to wield it, and your ability to destroy and rebuild.  Sun/Saturn, you need to become your own authority.  Sun/Mercury, self expression and processing information is a fundamental task.  Sun/Jupiter needs to learn to live by a personal philosophy, and acknowledge its own wisdom and instinct.  Sun/Venus has to live by what it values most.  Whatever house we find the Sun in will give us an obvious direction for the solar energies, but the Sun’s position affects the entire chart.

But what is the Sun, exactly?  It’s the first thing we learn in astrology, the place of the Sun.  But it seems that, after our initial explorations, we hardly ever venture back to considering the Sun, after getting caught up in the complex, myriad, ever-unfolding  mysteries of the astrological art.  Why would we bother focusing on something as simple as the Sun, a simple given, when there are all those great harmonics and points and new asteroids out there?

I’m finding that the longer I practice astrology, the more of a mystery the Sun becomes.  Astrologer Giordano Bruno (d.1600) called the Sun the ‘heart’ of the chart.  When I heard this many years ago I dismissed it as ‘old astrology,’ full of fabulous metaphors with no modern meaning. It wasn’t until I watched the Sun, and it’s role in the progressed chart, that the energy of the Sun finally made sense to me.

Those folks who dismiss astrology because all they know is the most basic element of astrology, have a point.

Are you an Aries, a Virgo, an Aquarius?  No.  Of course, you are nothing of the kind.  There are so many factors contributing to what you might consider the “I” that the idea rends itself ludicrous.

Can we define ourselves by our Suns?   Why would we want to?  Would you try to hang your whole being on the Moon, or the Ascendant, or any other single point of the chart?  Defining ourselves by the Moon might have some validity.  The Moon rules our physical life, our physical being.  The Moon is only in a sign for two and a bit days per month.  Much better than the 30 days that Sun sign astrology divides itself by.  It’s silly, the idea that one twelfth of the planet should define itself by the particular qualities of a particular month (and a month that’s out of sync, virtual, not literal, as we go by the precession of the equinoxes– i.e., the Sun is not literally within the constellation of Leo in the sky right now.  We are one sign out of sync.  Astrology itself is a wheel within a wheel, the entire sky a progression. But discussion of that another time…)

Most of us don’t understand the function of the Sun in the chart.  The best we come up with is a handful of simplified characteristic traits that may or may not apply, depending on the mitigating factors of the rest of the chart.  We focus on the most minute and intricate points of the chart, without really understanding the way something as obvious as the Sun functions.  What is its role in the chart?  What does it actually do?

People born under Virgo, that most analytical of energies, routinely refuse to define themselves as Virgos.  They will say, “I’m a Virgo, but…(my house is a mess, my love life is a mess, I’m the queen of chaos, I hate anything ordered…)  Good old Virgos, always hitting the nail on the head, in spite of themselves.

The Mystery of Solar Fire (part two)

Dawn Bodrogi