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Correspondences of the Sun

the classical correspondences of the Sun: day, metal, colour, incense, angel and deva

What the tradition reads

The grimoire tradition gives the Sun Sunday as its day and gold as its metal, and, in Agrippa's separate chapter on planetary colours, golden, saffron, purple and other bright colours as proper to it. The same author's chapter on planetary fumes gives the Sun a suffumigation built on saffron, the fruit of the laurel, cloves, myrrh and frankincense, and names frankincense again among the gums it lists more broadly for the Sun, in keeping with a solar temperament the tradition reads as vitality, authority, and the wish to be seen clearly and honoured rightly. Where the sources part company is the Sun's angel: Agrippa's own Scale of the Number Seven, in the second book, gives Raphael to the Sun, while the older Heptameron of Peter de Abano, and much of the practice that followed it, gives Michael to Sunday instead, reserving Raphael for Wednesday and Mercury. Both attributions are traditional, in the plain sense that both appear in primary grimoire sources rather than one being a later invention, and the honest practice states both rather than silently choosing between them. The Vedic tradition names the same office, Surya, the deva of light, praised in the Vedic hymns above all as the rising sun and dispeller of darkness, who, in Wikipedia's rendering, empowers knowledge, the good and all life. Surya gives his name to Ravivara, Sunday in the Hindu calendar, the day both Indian and Greco Roman traditions keep for the Sun.

The story

The correspondences given to each planet, its day, metal, colour and incense, descend to the present chiefly through Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, printed in the 1530s, a work that drew on centuries of earlier astrological and alchemical tradition and organised it into the tables later ceremonial magic simply inherited. Agrippa's own Scale of the Number Seven, in the second of the three books, lays out for each planet a matching sequence: its intelligence, its metal, its stone, its bird and beast, and the order of angels the tradition holds responsible for its influence, while the colours and incense given to each planet come instead from separate chapters earlier in the first of the three books, kept apart from the Scale's own table. Alongside Agrippa stood an older and more practical grimoire, the Heptameron attributed to the physician and philosopher Peter de Abano, which organised its own magical workings by the seven days rather than the seven planets directly, and assigned a ruling angel to each day that does not always match Agrippa's planetary angel for the same office. The two systems were compiled independently, by writers working in different genres of the same broader tradition, magical theory in Agrippa's case and practical ritual instruction in the Heptameron's, and later occultism, rather than resolving the disagreement, generally kept both, offering the practitioner two names to choose between for the same solar office.

Written from

Corpus key correspondence:Sun.