The Sun Enters Aries

On March 20th, the Sun moves into the zodiac sign Aries. This happens on the same day as the March Equinox, or Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The word “equinox” means equal night, so both the vernal and autumnal equinoxes are when there are equal hours of day and night. The Sun is exalted in Aries (at 19 degrees) because it is when the days start to grow longer, the ancients thought of this as the Invincible Sun (Sol Invictus) regaining strength after a long, dark winter. The Sun… if you can believe it… is associated with the tarot card called “The Sun.” The Rider Waite Smith card called “The Sun” depicts our solar system’s star, with a pleasant face watching over a garden of sunflowers and a naked baby astride a white horse. The child looks happy, arms wide, embracing the world.

As Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, the March equixno is considered the astrological new year. Aries is then the “Baby New Year” of the zodiac, which parallels to the nude baby on Waite’s The Sun card. In Western society, Spring represents a season of freshness, fresh buds and blossoms on the trees. It is the season when baby animals are born. Growing up, my mom would always say that spring “comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” to explain why the beginning of spring, in the Midwest especially, can be even stormier than the dead of winter. Aries means “ram” and the Aries symbol appears similar to the shape of a ram’s face with horns, but also looks like a plant sprouting forth from the earth.

Aries is associated with the head in the “Homo Signorum” or Man of Signs. Aries is ruled by the planet Mars, who was known by the Greeks as Ares, a homophone that literally means “destroyer.” Due to this association with Mars, the red, rusty planet, the planet of war, Aries is associated with blood pressure, because Mars is associated with blood. In Hermetic Qabalah The Sun card is associated with the Hebrew letter ר‎ resh which means head. Both Aries and the Sun are associated with the eyes. Aries because the eyes are inside our head, and the Sun is associated with the right eye because it’s light aids our vision.

In many other tarot traditions, The Sun card shows two people frolicking under the sun. The garden in the Sun card is often more obviously a visual homage to the Garden of Eden. This means the Sun continues a theme that starts in the Lovers, which appears to depict Adam and Eve after the Fall as their genitals are covered with fig leaves. (Prior to eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the two were blissfully unaware that they should be ashamed of their naked bodies—much like the naked child on The Sun). The theme of allusions to Adam and Eve continues in The Devil which shows the pair loosely bound by Satan or another demon. The Sun, coming before the Judgement card, heralds a return to paradise, so it is fitting that in many traditions that a couple resembling the first and only human inhabitants of the Biblical Paradise appear.

The Sun, for Waite, evokes a liberation from our material lives and our constricted, individual consciousnesses. As Rachel Pollack explains in her seminal book on tarot Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom:

For Waite the Sun experiences was essentially a burst of freedom. It was a breaking loose, a wonderful liberation from ordinary restricted consciousness to openness and freedom.
The grey stone wall in the [card] represents the past life, bound by a narrow perception of reality. The super-consciousness of the Sun is characterized by feeling a part of the whole rather than an isolated individual.

Aries is associated with independence and liberation. As the baby, Aries represents birth, bursting forth from one’s mother’s womb. (Pisces is often compared to the amniotic fluid of the womb, and the pre-birth, pre-conscious stage of being). Aries is independence because we are severed (Mars) from the umbilical cord and separated from our mothers. Again, there is a clear parallel to the Spring season, in that human or mammalian birth is not so different from a plant sprouts and breaks free of its seed and then burst forth through the earth. Or a baby bird pecking it’s way out of the safety of it’s shell.

What are you liberating yourself from this Aries season? What are you giving new life to?