A New Dawn (a card for the Equinox)

Card XXVI Revealed

The Sun Rises

On a Land Divided.

Snow and Shadows Melt,

Blurring their Boundaries.

Signs of life

Undulate anew,

Darkness disappears

Into fine lines,

Age reversed.

With this warmth rising

Is there hope for an end

to this relentless cold?

Equinox Alert! The first day of spring 2025 is on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at 5:01 a.m. EDT (2:01 a.m. Pacific).

Divination

A new phase, a new day is dawning in your world. This awakening is significant in multiple ways giving warmth, clarity and fresh chances to begin. This sunrise may have been spurred by an event, realization or inner insight that sheds light on your path forward. What was before murky can be seen in greater clarity. Old, dormant shadows are melting that may have scared or impeded your progress before. The veins of the earth reveal that this knowledge was known in your depths all this time and are ready to come to the surface for both you and the world around you to recognize. Take part in the radical act that imagines divisions melting in this new rising sunlight!

Symbolic Interpretations

The Sun is the source of life and has symbolically the “magical properties of fertility, creativity, prophecy, healing and… a living potentiality for wholeness that dwells in every individual” (Book of Symbols, p. 22). In many cultures it is depicted as a male deity but in many parts of the world it had feminine origins until mythologies changed.

In alchemy, the Sun was seen as the quintessence of a person and the universal power of growth, healing and mana. It was a return to unity after fragmentation. The Sun Spirit rises out of the primordial opposites. The sun also gives clarity to consciousness and the warmth to empathy. It signals the “redemptive strivings of humankind - a harmonious world that evolves out of the play of the imagination.”

The Sun card in the Tarot depicts the child and denotes an essence of safety, warmth and play. Irene Gad, in Tarot and Individuation, writes that this card can “embody the polarity of the opposites and reborn humankind reuniting at this level with the consciousness of the all” (p. 265).

Sun Card medley retrieved from Altar Gods

The Sun and light are pivotal images for Norse Mythology and their expression within the runes. Runes connected to the sun and to light are auspicious and brilliantly positive within rune readings. The rune of wunjo translates as joy or bliss and is illustrated in the image of a “village on a hilltop surrounded by fields rich with grain is framed by the rising summer sun” (Nordic Runes, Mountfort).

The rune sowulo translates directly as sun and guides seafarers. It is the “light of the word” and “the sky shield, and shining radiance, and the nemesis of ice” (which represents the hardship of the Nordic world) (p. 148). Dagaz, daybreak, is the “gods’ messenger” that “grants ectstasy, good hope, and a boon to all” (p. 184). You can certainly imagine into the ancient times of Northern Europe and how the Sun provided such hope, healing and nourishment after the rough winters. In its opposite manifestation, ice and hail emerge as runes of difficulty and hardship.

Rune meanings retrieved from Berloga Workshop

Light has a Shadow Side

However, where there may be enlightenment there can also be the destruction of the environment. The Apollonian emphasis on light and consciousness swells and consumes the still unknown regions of darkness that rest there for a reason. The Sun nurtures life, but in overabundance, can burn and defile it as well. As we contemplate global warming and light pollution, the Sun serves as a representation of the growing heat we are unable to lesson or hault on its trajectory like that infamous chariot ride in the Ancient Greek myth of Phaethon. These myths remind us that there is no greater gift than the absence of light, quiet sweet darkness, in the dead of night when we rest ourselves from the conscious brilliance of each day.

The card also depicts what looks like red veins running through the contours of the landscape, connecting us to the blood flow and pulse of the earth itself. To the Greeks, blood was considered one of the humours and was associated with the Sun, complete with its “warmth, cordiality and magnanimity” that could appear in the temperaments of someone with this humour (Book of Symbols p. 396). Red Blood cells seal wounds and carry oxygenated nutrients throughout the body. This image of blood, Sun and healing all came in the personal reading I did within the context of the great changes of 2020.