The Sun, Our Unfixed Star

Written By Maeg Keane

Preface: Entanglements

There is a list of references at the end, but I want to credit three people at the start. It feels wrong to relegate them to a bibliography.

This piece is in conversation with Jason Holley's work on day sect and night sect consciousness and is inspired in great part by their NORWAC 2022 talk called “The Sun and Intrapsychic Coherence.” In that lecture, they described how abstractified the Sun is in astrology compared to other celestial bodies. Holley offered that “the Sun needs our stories.” I took that very seriously — and also reversed it, thinking we also need more solar stories. Or at least I needed more solar stories. This writing is a starting response to that need.

Second, conversations with my favorite son of Apollo (sorry, Asclepius) — the one and only Hawk — are a big part of this writing as well. Hawk’s public thinking on the Sun is part of it, particularly their attention to the Sun in detriment, that winter Sun in Aquarius. Hawk is really good at talking about the Sun's range, which I do not think the Sun is often afforded. But it’s also that Hawk embodies the most life-encouraging of the solar principles. To bear witness to that embodiment continues to impact how I approach our star. I strongly recommend following Hawk’s work and supporting their Patreon. Get a reading with them, mentor with them, all the things.

The last big part of this cocktail is Catherynne M. Valente’s arresting novel Deathless. Reading that book was one of the great joys of this year for me. In it, I found the most accurate depiction of what it is like to be in relationship with the more difficult albeit delicious side of a god I deeply love. While Valente does not reference that god nor does she mention the Sun in this way, Deathless put some pieces together for me about what it is to be, as Valente puts it, "The Tsar of Life."

The Sun, Our Unfixed Star

“That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
— Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente

The Sun is a golden zombie, a deathless thing, running a track made of animal bodies over and over and over. Simultaneously, the Sun sits still upon the throne of its own plasma-body at the center of everything. The Sun is a molten skypainter, season bringer, green unfurler, dawn’s own fingers, a cosmic sea dweller, the seeing searer, the burning and charring one. A prince at his coronation and a king abdicating, crown clanging on the palace floor as he makes his way into the dark wood of the underworld. The Sun’s descent and re-emergence marks our days. Every solar hero and god who wears our star’s face goes to hell.

When I see the Moon, I am overcome by its intimacy, that it is our satellite, our sibling-parent, our kin. The Moon is an outlier among the celestial bodies in our solar system for this closeness to us. The Sun is an outlier too but so strange, being both an outsider and at the center. The Sun is exceptional in our solar system because it is a star, more made of the stuff of Sirius than Saturn. The fixed stars are more remote, even less earthly, even less human — and yet, here is this star, not remote but the defining feature of our system. Here is this fixed star who moves. The Sun is not like other stars because it is our star, this one who seems to have been plucked from the outer freezing firmament and made to be the beating nuclear-fusing alien-heart of our world.

A few years ago, I noticed something: I don’t pay a lot of attention to the Sun in astrology charts. Embarrassing, really. I pay attention to aspects, combustions, and if the person is a Leo Rising, yes, of course, we will discuss the Sun. But generally, I tend to look elsewhere. I “yada yada” the Sun a bit. Perhaps an overcorrection from when I only knew about Sun signs or an overcorrection to “the Sun cult.” Perhaps it’s that the Sun’s keywords don’t compel me, or I don't admit that they do: “ego” “authority” “power” “illumination” “individual.” None of these words are bad news on their own. They can go either way. How easily, though, am I distracted by the Moon and her night sect companions who seem more unruly and relational and somatic by contrast. 

In comparison to the multiplicity of the night sky, the Sun seemed a harsh bright light, illuminating a single answer where there ought to be so many questions. The Sun is too certain, heady, detached, hierarchical, linear. Its daytime reign is all booming with sky-gods, made of decrees and "objective" truth, eschewing the strange many-limbed underworld. Plus, the Moon is of the people, and the Sun the king. It’s not hard to choose — even though no one is asking me.

Even now, when I try to talk about the Sun it comes out all abstract and vague (again, see Jason Holley's work on this), or I find it too heroic, like a brute with a mission coming in when I’m rooting for the monster he wants to slay. Or else the Sun seems a tyrant, demanding everyone see only him. The Sun is too center, too everything, too brilliant, I can’t get a good look. You’re not supposed to look directly at the Sun anyway.

When I discover I have a bias against a planet or star, it is like someone flicks a sterling silver goblet. The sound rings in my ears. I see Mercury rubbing their hands together, gleeful, and tousling the hair on the head of the prejudice I hold. We’re about to fix a problem we’ve found by making it more of a problem. We’re about to make a rascal out of simplicity. 

If the Sun is a tyrant, what’s he doing abdicating power every evening? Does the Sun really blot out the many for its own singular spotlight or does the light of the Sun reveal and make possible the multiplicity of Earth? If I don’t define the Sun only by its presence but also by its absence, doesn't the Sun setting every day make way for the diversity of the heavens? 

When so many solar stories are about underworld journeys, how can we say the Sun is not chthonic? Every time Venus stations retrograde, my corner of the internet floods with the tale of Inanna’s descent. Retrogrades are solar dances. To get close to the Sun is to vanish into the underworld. As if the Sun has gone there so many times that its very body has become a traveling Hades.

Perhaps we take a cue from the Moon here and take a sideways approach. Reflect the light rather than stare directly at God. Jason Holley suggested we turn our attention to solar stories and solar beings, and certainly, the myths are replete with solar heroes. In Holley’s lecture, they mentioned Ra and Apollo. I’d like to add another solar character to the mix.

Antauges, The Sparkler. Chrysokomes, The Golden Haired. The Sun-loving vine. Dionysus “is fire itself, and even the raging Sun” (Bramshaw, 2013). Dionysus of the wild honey caves, fermenting in the heat of Sirius’s rising. Dionysus as indestructible life (see Karl Kerenyi’s work). 

I know Dionysus is often described as a face of the planet Jupiter. I have approached him that way too. Jupiter is that laden table, the festivities, the luxuriating of Dionysus. Dionysus, wine cup in hand. Certainly Zeus, a face of Jupiter, favored his thrice-born child. The planet Jupiter is the liberator, and Dionysus is also called Liber. It fits. 

However, for me, Dionysus is solar first. In Crete, Dionysus was a solar bull and bee god, often portrayed with a solar disk on his forehead. He is Karneios, “the horned Sun.” The Orphics tell us, “He is called Dionysos because he whirls in circular motion through the immeasurably extended heavens” and “The Sun whom men call Dionysos…” From the Eumolpic verses: “Dionysos with face of flame glistens like a Star with his rays” (Darrow, 2019). 

Dionysus is a rising-dying-rising one, much like many solar gods and goddesses. One of my favorites of Dionysus’s epithets is Nyktelios or The Night Sun. In this form, Dionysus is Zagreus, son not of Semele but Persephone. The underworld is his home. As the Night Sun, he is also called Meilichios. Meilichios is an epithet given to several gods, including subterranean Zeus. It translates to “mild,” “kindly one,” or “easy to entreat.”

I know astrology says the Sun is constant compared to the Moon but imagine with me that the Sun has at least two faces (because it does). One face is life-giving, present, a drum beating, a cymbal clanging, it’s noisy, impossible, joyful, but a great threat. It is life-bringing and liberating, but as it intensifies, it is too much brilliance, too much heat, and our skin that was the source of our great desire is left stinging, crisp, tight, fried — our whole bodies thirsty in a way that wine will not quench. This is Dionysus Bromios. Call him Bacheus, call him Liber, call him Karneios. 

When we cannot take it anymore, we pray for the Sun’s other face to arrive but it is a face who arrives by leaving. A presence defined by absence. We know our prayers and offerings have worked when the heat sinks into the cold, dark earth, into the cold, dark sea. This is Dionysus Meilichios. Call him Zagreus, call him Nyktelios. This is the Sun at night, the Sun in winter. It is relief. It is like rain falling after the festival is over. Here, we get Dionysus of the ivy plant, Dionysus of the snake who is a river. 

Until we at last miss Bromios and clang our cymbals and play our trumpets at the water’s edge, asking him to return. Like the dawn, he always does.

A solar god, Dionysus is a scorching reveler. He is of wrath and ecstasy. His mouth is full of blood and wine and honey. He releases us from care and bonds, connects us in community, invites us into pleasure and vibrancy, into a release from labor and a release from shame. He is also the horror rattling in us as we see him rip apart a young goat, let it lie in a dead heap of dislocated bones and sinew, only to then, to our fresh terror and relief, reanimate it. He is the Sun that cooks your flesh and the Sun that is the energy bound up in everything you eat and drink that makes life possible. It is the energy that emits from you, microstar that you are.

This is life, indestructible. It is the ghoulish face of the aliveness, thrumming in rot. It is the aliveness that runs through all things, all the way down and out of death. Dionysus dies and is deathless. He burns cold like his first mother Persephone, full of bone, water, and darkness. He burns hot like his second mother Semele, full of lightning, plasma, and epiphany. Vinewood and figwood, honey turning to mead by the sheer force of the Sun, and the evergreen three-lobed ivy in a cold rain. 

In her novel Circe (another favorite), Madeline Miller cuttingly describes the Sun this way: “you are a harp with only one string and the note it plays is yourself.” A sullen, protesting child of our star, I found so much satisfaction in Miller’s portrayal of Helios’s specific cruelty. Tyrant, I thought. What an oppression singular focus. Because upon the Sun, I projected all my frustrations with hyper-individuality, with an obsessive need to categorize, to control through knowledge and visibility, to cohere rather than let life be messy and changeable, for power over instead of power with. 

But what other note should the Sun play besides its own? What an incredible thing — to know your note and then play it. It seems like every person I talk to, whether in session or in my personal life, is trying to sort that very thing out. What is my note? What have I to contribute? What is my heart’s song and its next verse? If I know it, do I have the courage to play it? What kind of exuberant raucous could we make together if we each struck our chord? What chlorophyll would we make with the sound of our harps? What vital possibilities would emerge with our noisemakers, drums, and flutes, as we watch the Sun descend again into the dark?

In Dionysus’s half-open eyes, I see a Sun who individuates because diversity only exists if we have difference. If it is ego, if it is power, it does not end in the one exceptional being lording power over all. It is a Sun that coheres by division, by cycles, by change. It encourages defiance and difference, making us all little kings of a kingdom, which we in turn must acknowledge we are responsible for, that we are in oath to, whose sacred rites require us, whose crown we wear and whose crown we remove.

The Sun is the center of our solar system and the center of each of us, at the center of our separateness, our heart, that blood pump that wants to move toward. The Sun is also the center of all, the blistering life-giving heat of blood and nectar, the ebullience of all things, the golden thread that stitches us to each other. Neither good nor bad, center and outlier, it is life itself, burning and burning.

Is it sovereignty or unity? Is it singularity or multiplicity? Is it power as reign or power as abdication? The Sun is up and down, bright and dark, sky and storm spirit, and at home in the deepest reaches of death. The Sun is Bromios and Meilichios, summer and winter starlight. Of course, of course it is both.

I wrote much of this post as the planetary and stellar devotee that I am. As an astrologer, my next question is how does this translate to our birth charts? I’m not sure. I have ideas, inklings, hypotheses but I only really know once I sit in session with you. Starting in 2024, I’m going to offer a Sun-focused reading called Rays of Light. If you want a twist on your Sun placement and how it relates to the rest of your chart, stay tuned.

reading update

Since posting this, Rays of Light has officially launched. You can read about it and (if my calendar is open) book it over on my “Astrology Readings” page.

References

Maeg Keane
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