Sunshine Superman

Superman wears a red cape -- like the red banner on the Rider-Waite Sun card -- and has a big S on his chest -- the 19th letter of the alphabet, and also the initial of sole, soleil, and sun. That alone would be enough to associate him with the 19th trump -- but there's more. There's the Donovan Leitch song that gave this post its title, for example, or Superman's association with the white horse.

More to the point, though, Superman's power comes from the Sun. He's not super under the red sun of Krypton, only under the yellow sun of earth -- a.k.a. the Sun. (This is another variation on the Samson myth, with the Sun's rays being metaphorically its "hair.")

The color of the Sun's rays is the important thing. Even on Earth, Superman loses his powers if someone nefariously uses a blue filter to turn the Sun's yellow rays to green!

A green Sun is certainly a strange idea, but it apparently had some currency in what Nabokov (a famous synaesthete) called "the pale-green eighteenth century," as witness these Tarot cards from 1730-1742.

I looked up the Nabokov passage in question -- Adam Krug going through some of his notes in Bend Sinister -- and found that the paragraph that ends with the pale-green 18th century begins with the Sun.

Old Zoroastrian motif of the rising sun, origin of Persian ogee design. The blood-and-gold horrors of Mexican sacrifices as told by Catholic priests or the eighteen thousand Formosan boys under nine whose little hearts were burned out upon an altar at the command of the spurious prophet Psalmanazar -- the whole thing being a European forgery of the pale-green eighteenth century.

Why would some Tarot cards make the Sun green? I have no idea. Not only is our Sun not green, there are no green stars anywhere in the universe. The stellar spectrum goes from red to white to blue, but the only place you'll ever see a green star is at an Esperanto conference. Héri, Laurent, and Cheminade chose to make the Sun the one color it could never possibly be.

Anyway, if the Sun's rays were green instead of yellow, Superman would fall out of the sky. And what if they were white?

Trick question. The Sun's rays are white, obviously. If they were really yellow, white things (which look white because they reflect all frequencies of visible light equally) would look yellow. The universal idea that the Sun is "yellow" -- despite the fact that it normally appears to be almost perfectly white -- is something of a mystery. A surprising number of people (not scientists, of course) maintain that the Sun really was yellow in the past. They remember it being yellow when they were children and think that it must somehow have changed. (This is sometimes given as an example of the Mandela Effect.) However, young children even today, despite indisputably growing up under a white Sun, naturally and spontaneously say that the Sun is yellow and draw it that color. (I clearly remember a white Sun throughout my childhood. I also remember tree trunks being gray, despite the fact that all the other children I knew inexplicably colored them brown in coloring books.) The Sun does appear yellow when it is low on the horizon -- the "golden hour" -- but it also appears orange or red around sunrise and sunset; none of that changes the fact that its normal color is white.

In fact, due to its temperature, the Sun's peak emission is at a frequency of about 500 nm. In other words, though it emits a great deal of light at all visible frequencies and thus appears white, it emits more green light than any other color. Perhaps those 18th-century cardmakers were on to something after all!