The Sun

Ask yourself who you are with the job, the family and the manners set aside, and the answer that is left is the Sun. It is what you would go on doing with no one watching, and what gives you a small, private pride when it goes well.

In your chart

Sign comes first: the style of the self, the colour everything you do is done in. House comes second and says more. A Sun in the tenth is spent on a public role, in the fourth on home and roots, in the seventh on partnership. Aspects come last, and show how the self meets everything else in you. A Sun that trines the Moon sits at peace with itself; a Sun squared by Saturn had to earn its confidence.

Themes

The Sun is vitality, will and the wish to matter. When it is prominent, identity is not in question, and the work is sharing it generously enough to leave room for other people. When it is quiet, tucked into a cadent house or thinly aspected, the self is found later and held more lightly, and that has its own freedom.

In the older tradition the Sun is also the father, and more widely the figures of authority you grew up measuring yourself against. Its condition shows how comfortable you are being the authority yourself.

One degree a day

The Sun goes once round the zodiac in a year, about a degree a day, so its sign is the one placement most people know without a chart. With the Moon it is a luminary, one of the two lights, which astrology counts apart from the planets. Everything else in the chart is read in relation to it.

The tradition gives it two dignities: it rules Leo, and it is exalted in Aries, at 19°, where it is read as unusually strong. Its joy, in the old lists, is the ninth house, the one that looks far.

How the analysis treats it

The Sun opens the planet chapters: sign, degree and house named, then each aspect to it taken in turn. A chapter on the Sun and Moon together follows, on how the two work as a pair.