The Symbolism of the Summer Solstice & the Sun
The Ancestral Significance of the Summer Solstice
The Summer Solstice marks the day that the Sun reaches its yearly zenith, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year.
Here as the solstice approaches, it fills our minds with images of birds singing their songs atop fruit-laden trees, succulent garden-variety vegetables, carefully tended, now ripe for the harvest, mirthful parties and adventures in the great out-of-doors, and the freedom to partake in the joys of life with abandon once more.
For millennia, the summer solstice has been a symbol of fruition.
The Summer provides for those seedlings which we had carefully planted in the springtime. It gives them all the sunlight, nutrients, and nurturance they need in order to flourish. For our ancestors, the summer was a time of bounty and prosperity because they could finally see the (literal) fruits of their labors.
The first harvest of summer called for due celebration. Harvest festivals around this time of year were common across many cultures throughout history. These celebrations allowed for communities to come together, to share their abundance, to bond over their shared experiences, and to give thanks to the Sun and to the gods for the successful harvest.
Peasant Girl With Rake, Hans Dahl
However, summer is not solely a period of celebration and merriment.
Agriculture formed the back-bone of many ancient civilizations. To these cultures, the summer was crucial. During the summer, the first crops would come to harvest, but the summer sunshine and warm temperatures still had to be taken full advantage of.
The light and warmth of the summer Sun was essential for the autumn harvest crops to flourish. The same diligence that brought the first spring seeds to fruition had to be maintained. People needed to make the most of the summer months to prepare for the coming winter.
Thus, the summer solstice holds profound archetypal significance. The Sun reaching its apex and resuming its path embodies the culmination and continuation of hard work and commitment.
The Solstice is a universal symbol of fruition, a time when we see our efforts pay off in kind, and where we can reflect on that promise of abundance and bounty. It offers us a powerful opportunity to reflect on the seedlings of ideas and intentions we set in the Spring, to celebrate the work we’ve done, to reap the rewards of those efforts, then to look into the future at all we can still set out to accomplish.
The Significance of The Sun
“Just as the sun, by its own motion and in accordance with its own inner law, climbs from morn till noon, crosses the meridian and goes its downward way toward evening, leaving its radiance behind it , and finally plunges into all enveloping night, so man sets his course by immutable laws and, his journey over, sinks into darkness to rise again. ”
Common to all celebrations of the solstice, of harvest, and of summer, is the Sun.
Life on Earth could not exist without the Sun’s light and warmth. The Sun is our life-giver, our light-bearer, and is one of the most ancient objects of worship for this very reason.
Many cultures related the Sun to a deity, typically one who rode a chariot that carried the Sun across the sky, creating sunrise and sunset.
People especially worshipped these sun gods, including Helios, Apollo, Ra, Sunna, and Sol, during the solstice. They thought of the summer solstice as the height of their gods’ power, their great triumph over the forces of darkness. These solar deities represented not only the power of the physical sun but also the very human qualities of creativity, knowledge, courage, and vitality.
Ancient peoples formed countless rites and rituals in worship of the Sun. Through these practices they expressed their gratitude for a successful harvest. They tried to earn the Sun’s favor, to capture some of its vital essence to ensure good fortune for the rest of the season.
Solstice bonfires were among the most common way to honor the Sun. Ritual fires represent both the transformative heat and the illuminating light the Sun provides. We can find ritual bonfire practices in cultures all across Europe. They were a universal way to celebrate the Sun, to honor the changing of the seasons, and to spiritually renew oneself.
All across the globe, humans have built massive stone monuments to the Sun. Stonehenge in England, or the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu, for instance.
These monuments were designed to track the Sun’s movements, and to have a place for people to gather in reverence. The ability to predict the Sun’s movements was also the ability to predict the seasons, and the agricultural cycles of growth and harvest. An intimate working knowledge of the sun was vital to early agricultural societies.
It is no wonder why they held it in such high esteem.
The Sun as an Archetypal Symbol
“How easy it is to be captivated by the sheer splendor of the sun’s shining, by its capacity to make manifest a world it seeds with its own fire. How naturally we imagine our own capacity to know and to create, as the bright sun of consciousness. How many of the thousand of sense perceptions imprinted upon the body and mind over a lifetime are authored by the sun; How instinctively flora a fauna turn their face sunwards, as if to the Center.”
At the most fundamental level, the Sun is the creator and preserver of life. Its warmth and radiance are what make life on Earth possible. Early humans observed this life-giving quality as they experienced the progression of the seasons and noticed the yearly rhythms of birth, growth, and decline.
As human populations grew and larger civilizations began to form, agricultural mastery became a necessity to feed an ever-growing number of people. This led to an even greater dependency on the Sun and concretized it in our collective unconscious as a universal symbol of life, energy, and creation.
As the Earth’s cosmic light-source, the Sun has also long been connected to themes of enlightenment, revelation, and consciousness.
Just as light illuminates objects in the dark, the Sun, as a symbol, illuminates the darkness of our minds. It is the vital spark of apprehension, understanding, and knowing that engages our thinking function, and imbues us with renewed direction and purpose.
The Sun in Alchemy
The Marriage of the Red King and the White Queen, a common alchemical allegory for the meeting of solar and lunar consciousness
For the alchemists, the Sun was a symbol of ‘solar consciousness’. The principle ‘logos’.
Logic.
Solar Consciousness is our innate ability for reason, rationale, judgement, and insight. It is the expansion of conscious awareness through logical thinking, intellectual understanding, and the pursuit of knowledge.
“In what we may call solar consciousness, to distinguish from lunar consciousness, the ego is the center of consciousness and holds the levers of control… Solar consciousness can proceed by logical thinking rather than by association, metaphor, and image. “
- Murray Stein
Through solar consciousness, one discovers purpose, meaning, and inner authority by engaging with their capacity to evaluate, to understand, and to differentiate. The Sun and solar consciousness is the ordering principle of the universe. The essential force that gives the cosmos structure and makes it comprehensible to human understanding.
The Sun in Astrology
In astrology, the Sun represents the center of the personality. It is the vital spark within that animates, that endows one with direction and purpose. One’s Sun sign expresses how that individual navigates and associates with the concept of self-expression.
“When we are in touch with this solar force and consciously activate it, we declare, ‘I am a unique individual in the world. There is no other like me. I have entered this life with a unique purpose and a contribution to make that is mine and mine alone.’ Thus, the Sun gives us the desire to become more than we are, to grow, and to shine in the world.”
-Liz Green, Astrology For your Self
The Sun changes zodiac signs about every 30 days. While it is not the most personalized piece of information in one’s individual astrology, it is the organizing function that brings all other aspects of the self into relation with each other. Much like how the Sun’s gravitational pull binds our entire solar system together, so too does the astrological Sun act as the center around which every other part of our personality orbits.
As Archetypal Astrologer, Richard Tarnas describes in his book “Cosmos and Psyche”, The Sun is:
“The central principle of vital creative energy, the will to exist the impulse and capacity to be, to manifest, to be active, to be central, to radiate, to ‘shine”: to rise above, achieve, illuminate, and integrate; the individual will and personal identity, the seat of mind and spirit, the animus, the executive functions of the self or ego, the capacity for initiative and purposeful assertion, the drive for individual autonomy and independence; directed, and focused consciousness and self-awareness, the centrifugal expression of the self…”
The Sun in the Tarot
The Sun card from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot by Uusi
Combining these previously discussed themes of radiance and warmth, life and energy, logic and consciousness, uniqueness and self expression, is the tarot card, “The Sun”.
"The Sun" card is widely regarded as one of the most positive and uplifting cards of the deck. When this card appears in a reading, it tells that us that whatever trials and tribulations we have faced are over now. The hard parts of life have passed, and whatever lessons needed to be learned have been revealed to us. The task that the Sun in tarot gives us is to understand and integrate this knowledge with hope and optimism.
Above all, The Sun, in the Tarot, is a symbol of joy through enlightenment. The saying “ignorance is bliss” holds no weight under the illuminating solar light. Effusive happiness, empowered realizations, and the attainment of a hightened level of consciousness are at the center of this card.
As Tarot scholar Alejandro Jodorowsky writes in his book, “The Way of the Tarot”, If the Sun card spoke, it would say:
“I am ceaselessly renewing myself. By consuming myself, I give my heat to every blade of grass, every animal, and all living things without exception: it is fine with me if you call it Love. Cyclically, I disappear and come back again. Similarly, to enter my splendor, I expect human beings to be capable of burying their pasts and starting a new life. I will help them. Where I shine, I dissolve all doubt. I enter the darkest nooks of the soul and inundate them with my light. Pushed by my breath, you will cross the river of demented impulses and, purified, reach the region where everything grows effortlessly. In the Tarot, Joy, abundance, radiance, themes of realization, revelation, coming to awareness, and consciousness.”
Final Thoughts
Perhaps one of the most ancient symbols conceivable to the human mind, the Sun has been present for the entire history of our species, subtly guiding our the rhythms of our lives as it does the process of the seasons. The Sun is not only the origin of all life on earth, but is also the force that keeps life going.
All throughout human history, we can find evidence of solar worship, especially during the summer solstice. These universal practices are evidence of just how much importance and reverence was placed on the Sun for its capacity to shine, to warm, and to define the very cycles of nature herself.
Our light-bearer and our life-giver, the Sun has earned a special place in the collective unconscious’s archetypal symbolism. By studying both the Sun’s exoteric influences, such as rituals, rites, and celebrations, as well as the esoteric, such as alchemy, tarot, and astrology, we can ascertain just how magnificent a symbol The Sun has been throughout history, and the relevance it still carries in our modern lives today.
