What is the role of the sun in Masonic symbolism?

The sun serves primarily as a symbol of intellectual light, divine power, and sovereign authority within the lodge 1. As the source of physical illumination, it represents the search for spiritual and intellectual light 1. Adorning the lodge as an emblem of divine goodness and omnipresence, it also appears in ritual imagery under the All-Seeing Eye 1.

In the government of the lodge, the sun symbolizes order and authority. Just as the sun rules the day, one of the three lesser lights represents the sun, and by extension, the Worshipful Master who governs the lodge with regular precision 1. The daily course of the sun defines the station of the three principal officers: the Master in the East represents the rising sun, the Junior Warden in the South represents the meridian sun at its zenith, and the Senior Warden in the West represents the setting sun 1.

In astronomical and seasonal symbolism, the point within a circle originally signified the sun, bounded by two parallel lines representing the solstitial extremes of the solar year 1. These boundaries correspond to the feast days of the two Saints John, marking the northern and southern limits of the sun's annual circuit 1.

Wilmshurst offers a psychological reading, taking the sun in the South to signify illuminated human intelligence—the balance point where natural reason meets spiritual intuition 2. In his view, this intellectual light serves the Mason through his self-development, though it is symbolically eclipsed in the darkness of the Third Degree, where human reason gives way to the divine principle itself 2.