The Sun is card number 31 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows the sun. In the tradition its core sense is success, vitality, warmth and joy; one of the strongest positive cards, lending its energy to whatever sits near it.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Ace of Diamonds, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the sun takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Die Sonne. As House 31 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on success, vitality and clear, positive energy, and the card is conventionally treated as one of the strongest favourable cards in the entire deck, capable of softening even a difficult neighbour. In combination, Sun followed by Fish reads as financial success, while Sun preceding Clouds reads as success currently obscured by confusion but fundamentally sound underneath it, since Sun's presence in a pairing is generally read as improving whatever it touches rather than the reverse.