I didn't expect this post to become what it is. Yesterday, Dr. Olomi shared his Sun remediation post on Patreon, and I started writing as an open journal, just processing, proliferating his beautiful themes. But it turned into something like a hug on my mind. It sent me back to his 2022 podcast on the medieval significations of the Sun, that foundational episode where he traces how the concept of the Sun in astrology grows itself from ancient authors and philosophy. I revisited his lecture on the alchemy of the luminaries. I went through the whole nine, really trying to figure out how much I take the Sun for granted, giving myself space to meditate on its beauty.
For those less familiar with traditional astrology: this isn't horoscope territory. Medieval and Hellenistic astrology treat the planets as carriers of meaning refined over centuries. The Sun is not "your personality" but a force with specific philosophical, spiritual, and material significations. Dr. Olomi works in this tradition, drawing heavily from Arabic sources and Islamic philosophy. What follows is my attempt to sit with his teachings and find myself in them.
Vitality
I got a lot of sun over the last week in Curaçao. A new breath into myself with every sunrise permeating through until the last breath I use to chase sunsets. I even have a channel on River of just me posting pictures of the Sun.
Dr. Olomi says the Sun represented and governed vitality: a life-generating force that comes from the soul and animates the body, an inner energy. There's a difference between being alive and feeling the force that makes you alive. The Sun governs the latter.
Ruh, Iman, and the Animated Soul
Dr. Olomi connects the themes of light, the soul, the self, the collective, shadows, illusions, mirage, delusions, and Iman. In the alchemy podcast, he explains both luminaries, with the Sun as an alchemic force bringing life. The Sun equals Ruh, which is basically "spirit" that breathes life into the soul.
He makes a distinction I keep returning to: faith, belief, and Iman are different things. Faith is intellectual assent. You accept something as true. Belief is faith with emotional investment. You feel its truth. But Iman is something else entirely. Iman permeates through you and inspires transformative action. It's not what you think or feel but what those thoughts and feelings make you do. You can believe in generosity and still hoard. Iman is when the generosity moves through you before you decide to be generous.
That is the light, he says. The Sun can be the embodiment of religion, and the wisdom that comes from understanding the soul, not as doctrine but as animating force. He has a later lecture on ensoulment, on how someone even begins to have a soul, that is very beautiful.
The Sun as Prism
One of the most powerful visuals Dr. Olomi presents is the Sun as a prism. When you're thinking about it in the astrological context, you're really thinking about how light is applied. Constant conversations of rays cast on different planets.
In a chart, the Sun doesn't act alone. It's always casting rays, or aspects in astrological terms, onto other planets. A trine to Jupiter bends the light differently than a square to Saturn. The quality of that refraction determines what kind of soul emerges. This is why two people with the same Sun sign can be unrecognizable to each other: the light hit different surfaces.
He says: "The Sun operates as a prism that individuates the soul through the collective soul."
So the collective soul, which is God, the source, comes to this prism, and the prism creates the individual soul. Let there be light, and let that light scatter into billions of distinct frequencies. He compares how the Sun, in astronomy, sits between the outer planets (traditionally Saturn and Jupiter) and the inner planets: Mars, Venus, Mercury, and us on Earth. The Sun mediates. It's the threshold between what's beyond us and what's within reach.
I see ensoulment visualized as a ray, and how that ray bends as it interacts with other forces. The aspects are the angles of incidence. The planets are the surfaces. And the soul that results is specific to that geometry.
Constructive and Deconstructive Light
Dr. Olomi specifies between constructive light and deconstructive light, and this distinction anchors everything else.
Constructive light illuminates without burning. It reveals what's actually there. "Constructive light transforms self-delusion into self-knowledge," he says. It clarifies your wants, your whims, your desires, not by eliminating them but by letting you see them accurately. You stop mistaking appetite for purpose.
Deconstructive light is what happens when the Sun dominates without mediation. It doesn't reveal; it blinds. It doesn't warm; it scorches. When you stare into the Sun, you don't see more clearly. You lose the ability to see at all.
Deconstructive light produces mirages. It creates the conditions for self-delusion precisely because it's so bright you think you must be seeing truth.
The question for any chart, and any person, is which kind of light is operating. And that depends on distance, aspect, and relationship to the Moon.
The Sun Needs the Moon
In the alchemy podcast, Dr. Olomi explains that the Sun needs the Moon more than the Moon needs the Sun in traditional astrology. This surprised me at first. The Sun is the source of light; the Moon only reflects it. How could the greater luminary depend on the lesser?
But it makes sense. You can have ideation of what the soul can be. The Sun provides that. But you don't get to ground it unless you have the embodiment that happens through the Moon. The Moon is the body, the material, the lived experience. The Sun is potential; the Moon is actualization.
You can really see who someone is when you look at how their Sun relates to their Moon. The Sun alone is just an ideal, an abstraction. A person with strong solar significations but weak lunar ones can seem brilliant but ungrounded, full of vision, incapable of living it. The Sun does its best when it's in relation to the Moon, or in relation to others.
This is why remediation practices for an overactive Sun often involve lunar activities: charity work, service, care for others. Things that cool the ego. Things that direct the light outward instead of letting it blaze inward. "It's the Moon that directs the light of the Sun." Without direction, light scatters. Without the Moon, the Sun is just heat.
Gnosis
The Sun is the embodiment of the knowledge of God and gnosis. The illumination of the Sun grants gnosis.
I like the word gnosis. I wrote it on the board at a creative summit I went to in October 2025, trying to name what my year has been like. Gnosis isn't knowledge you acquire; it's knowledge that transforms you by virtue of having it. You can know facts about swimming without being able to swim. Gnosis is the kind of knowing where the knowing is the swimming.
Awareness of the One, the embodied knowledge of God, illuminates all that you do. It animates your motion towards God. The gnosis transforms your life, not as a result of the knowledge but as the knowledge itself. The Sun is like an animated force to move and transform your life.
This connects back to Iman. Gnosis is what Iman looks like from the inside. Iman is the transformative action; gnosis is the illumination that makes Iman possible. The Sun governs both.
Prophecy
My favorite lines were when he talked about prophecy. The Sun governs prophecy because "what is prophecy if not the individual soul glimpsing at the collective?" "The raising up of the soul until it sees the celestial realm. It's that soul rising into the celestial sphere that grants it insight."
I sit with this. The prism works both ways. Light comes from the collective and individuates through us, yes, but sometimes the individual soul rises back up through the prism and sees the source. That's prophecy. Not telling the future but seeing the pattern that the future will follow because you've glimpsed the weave.
Sovereignty Over Ego
I love how Dr. Olomi talks about sovereignty. In modern astrology, they say the Sun is ego, and ego has become a dirty word. But sovereignty, thinking about the ego as the sovereign soul, an expression of self that is grounded, is really powerful.
He clarifies that many times he says "ego," he means sovereignty. The negative conversations about the Sun are where we're talking about ego in the corrosive sense. Ego as inflation. Ego as self-delusion. Ego as the thing that makes you believe your mirage.
But a healthy ego is sovereignty. It's the part of you that can say "I" and mean it. It's the dignified soul that knows itself and acts from that knowing. Without sovereignty, you're not humble; you're just porous. You become whatever you're around. You consume content and mistake it for personality.
Sovereignty is the Sun doing its job: individuating you from the collective while remaining connected to it. Ego-as-pathology is the Sun untempered, individuating so hard it forgets the collective exists.
Delusion, Mirage, Shadows
Dr. Olomi has a really consistent theme with mirages and delusion, exploring what light can do when it's refracted or placed in positions that can deceive. Being too consumed with the light, the concept of the Sun being so blinding and so hot that it doesn't do any good.
Depending on how you look at something, the light can produce shadows and illusions. That's where the concept of self-delusion comes from. The Sun is very much the self, but not a self grounded by the Moon. A self that's idealized and doesn't have any embodiment. That's delusion: a bright image of yourself with no body underneath it.
The Sun is an interesting way to think about the self in relationship to others: the desire for recognition and pride. When we stare into the Sun for too long, we become blind. The Sun goes from giving life to dominating, the desire for self to shine through at the expense of everything else. The dignity of the soul curdles into the tyranny of the ego.
Hyper-Individualism
The Sun in isolation is quite corrosive to the person. Hyper-individualism is really corrosive. But individualism is great when it can engender care towards other people, when your strong sense of self makes you more capable of seeing others, not less.
This is the difference between sovereignty and narcissism. Sovereignty says: I know who I am, and from that ground, I can meet you. Narcissism says: I know who I am, and that's all there is to know. Sovereignty uses the Sun's light to illuminate the world. Narcissism uses it to spotlight the self.
The Sun as Malefic and Benefic
I'm healing my sunburn as I write this, which feels almost too on the nose. Dr. Olomi talks about how the Sun can be a malefic and a benefic, depending on the distance. If you touch the Sun, you'll burn. But the Sun from far away can grow plants. Same light, different relationship.
Abu Mashar says the Sun is a malefic or infortune, harmful by bodily touch but beneficial by the rays. When the Sun dominates too much, it's outshining and making others invisible. Combustion is when a planet gets too close to the Sun and loses its own significations, burned up by proximity.
But not all planets burn the same. Mars is already hot and dry. It sometimes does better under the combustion of the Sun, everything a little sharper. Mars can handle the heat. Mercury is adaptable to the rays of the Sun as well. But Venus gets really harmed. Venus is relationship and harmony, and the Sun untamed becomes the hyper-individual: "we and we alone are glory." No room for the other. No capacity for harmony.
There's an Arabic lot measuring the distance between the Sun and Venus to determine the lot of adultery. When it's benign, there's healthy distance. Enough self to be in relationship, not so much self that relationship becomes impossible.
Remediation
We can't talk about remediation without talking about what happens when the Sun goes wrong.
Dr. Olomi writes: "When the Sun is severely corrupted or afflicted by being fallen and humiliated then it is like a man who stares into a reflection and sees nothing else. They are unthinking of their blessings, their obligations, or what is in their life. Its condition produces severely on the life of the individual and their vitality."
This prescribes what it means to have a Sun that isn't at its best, in a position to cause more harm than good. And where are you as a person with the free will to step in? You make a routine and ritual to be on the path that allows your soul to be clear. Remediation isn't resignation to a bad placement; it's conscious work to redirect the energy.
You have to have an awareness of self to have a witness of reality to have an awareness of God. When you are too self-concerned, too consumed by the Sun, why is it a danger to your vitality? Because vitality requires flow. The Sun gives life, but life isn't static. A Sun that only shines on itself isn't generating anything; it's just burning.
The Sun as a means for alchemy, transmuted. Painful alchemy of the soul. The need to burn to ash and transform the poisonous into healthy. This is remediation too.
My Chart
I don't have a lot of Sun influence in my chart. I kind of disregard the fact that I'm a Gemini sun now, honestly as a coping mechanism. I don't like sharing the same sun as Azealia Banks, Kanye, or Trump. Not because Sun signs determine everything, but because when you tell someone you're a Gemini, that's what they see first.
I'm actually a nocturnal chart, born at night. My Sun isn't well placed. It's in the 6th house, almost angular at a very late degree in the bound of Saturn. In traditional astrology, this means my Sun is working under Saturnian conditions: restriction, discipline, labor. The 6th house is the house of work and illness and service. Not exactly a solar throne. But maybe that's why this post needed to be written. The Sun doesn't come naturally to me. I have to reach for it. I have to go to Curaçao and chase sunsets and feel that revitalization consciously because it doesn't just happen. My chart asks me to work for my vitality, to find sovereignty through service, to let the bound of Saturn teach me that discipline and limitation can be forms of care.
What does a 6th-house Sun in the bound of Saturn mean for how I've lived these teachings? It means I understand remediation from the inside. It means I'm not solar by default. I'm solar by practice. It means the gnosis, if it comes, will come through labor. And maybe that's okay. Maybe that's my particular refraction.
There's something else I keep thinking about: perception. So much of astrology now is Sun-sign astrology. People learn their Sun sign first.
How do we perceive each other from the Sun in relation?
Working With Light
I work with light a lot in my creative coding practice, manipulating numbers into colors, using bloom post-processing effects. The visual on my website is literally in alignment with this post.
There's something about programming light that teaches you these concepts differently. When I work with GLSL shaders, I'm writing equations for how light interacts with surfaces: refraction, reflection, absorption. When I adjust bloom, I'm deciding how much the bright parts bleed into the dark parts, computationally.
I think about the prism when I'm splitting color channels. I think about combustion when a value clips because it's too hot. I think about constructive versus deconstructive light when I'm trying to illuminate a scene without washing it out. The creative coding practice has become a form of study.
2026 for me, I think, is about working with actual lighting. Not just simulated, not just pixels, but physical light. I want to understand how this translates into space. I want to see what happens when the medium isn't a screen but a room.