This post originally done in Dec. 2018, but added to in Dec. 2022.
1. The pre-Gebelin cards
The earliest Sun card is probably the hand-painted card of the "Charles VI" deck, also known as the "Gringonneur" for its artist (but both appellations are erroneous). Probably of Florence, c. 1460, it shows a lady with a distaff (left above), in something like a garden. The design is repeated in an early printed card from Bologna (center a), this time with a wall. It may be that the golden area with abstract flower patterns on it is also meant as a wall.
The figure may be Clotho, one of the three Fates in Greco-Roman mythology, as seen for example in a tapestry of ca. 1500 on the theme of Petrarch's Triumph of Death: his Laura lies dead after Atropos has cut the thread that Clotho spun and Lachesis measured (at left below).
An association with the sun would be by way of an essay by Petrarch, The Genius of Socrates, in which Clotho is said to govern the passage from the moon to the sun in the spirit's journey to its home in the Absolute. In another essay he had Clotho governing the soul's sojourn on the Moon, prior to the spirit's separation from the soul. That may be the reason why Clotho is associated with the Moon in Vieville's tarot of c. 1650 Paris.
Another possibility is Eve after the expulsion from Eden. There are several depictions of her spinning while Adam "delves," as Blake put it in his couplet, "When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was than the Gentleman?" An example from Ferrara is in the Bible of Borso d'Este, early 1460s (at right above). For the full illumination, with Adam on the other side and the expulsion on top, see my post on the Moon card. The wall behind her on the Bolognese card (center above), perhaps also the golden design on the Charles VI, would then be her separation from Eden. In the illumination, the boundary is shown as a small cliff.
Another early card, from either Lombardy or Venice (although the style is Ferrarese) shows a putto standing on a cloud grasping at the sun (center). Part of the six so-called "replacement cards" of the Visconti-Sforza deck (which has mostly Visconti and Sforza emblems, but one or two Venetian ones), I see a certain compositional affinity with the Charity card of the earlier Lombard deck of the 1440s (left, now in the Beinecke Library). In a card definitely from Ferrara or Venice (because it has the number XVIII as opposed to XVIIII), the sun sends its nourishing rays to us free of charge, without any consideration of our desert or its reward, like God's charity to us at the Last Judgment (far right). We are like the trees, which owe their life to photosynthesis and must have light to thrive, a message that may be what is conveyed by the card.
Charity is a card that survived only in Minchiate, of which some late 18th century example is below. From this card (at left below) I hypothesize that the round black spot on the Visconti deck is a flame. On the Sun card in this deck, there are two people below the sun, courting, or already married, or perhaps brother and sister. Another feature of this deck is that it has the 12 zodiacal signs, of which Gemini seems to be a man and a woman, each wearing only a wreath of leaves. This theme of the Gemini will reappear on the Tarot of Marseille card later.
The image of St. Paul reminds us of how the Sun could stand duty for God. This was something Christianity inherited from the ancient world, especially ancient Rome. It is said that December 25 was picked as the anniversary of Christ's birth because it coincided with the birthday of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, as decreed by the Roman emperor Aurelian in 274 c.e. Others think it was the reverse, to rival Christianity, and may have been later (see Wikipedia entry). In any case, in the medieval and Renaissance periods, the
Sun was frequently a symbol of Christ, whether in heaven, in the believer's
heart, or as the light vanquishing the darkness. A popular example
comparing Christ with the sun is Prudentius’s Hymnus Matutinus (Morning
Hymn), which starts, in the original Latin and my literal translation (from an Italian translation at http://www.cattoliciromani.com/75-thesaurus-liturgiae/24044-inni-della-liturgia-horarum-1-proprium-de-tempore-amp-psalterium/?page=7):
Nox et tenebrae et nubila, / confusa mundi et turbida, / lux intrat, albescit polus: / Christus venit, discedite.
Night, darkness, fog, /indistinct and confused things of the world, / the light penetrates, the sky clears; / Christ is coming: begone!
Vieville's card and that of the Cary Sheet both have an affinity with the earlier Sforza card, in that all three have a naked male figure below a sun; in the latter two, they are also both young boys. I detect a certain correspondence between these cards and a passage in the Chaldean Oracles, an ancient mystical text written in Greek and quoted by the Neoplatonists; it had been brought to the attention of the Italian humanists by the Greek scholar Gemistos Plethon. He had produced an edition of the Oracles that he brought with him when he came to Florence as part of the Greek delegation to a council that tried to unify the Greek and Latin churches. In this collection of sayings is a passage that describes a boy on an "aery wave", i.e., a cloud; I have copied it at right next to the card. The "things spoken" are certain spells or incantations. 
This passage is immediately followed by one of a boy on a horse. It is probable that A. E. Waite was inspired by those lines in the construction of his card. As for the Vieville, while it may have been inspired by a previous boy on a hobby horse, there is another possibility, namely a famous biblical passage at Revelation 19:11: "And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war." While the Vieville horse is not exactly white, in other respects it matches the biblical quote. This of course would not fit the happy child on Waite's card.
A version of the card found in a wall of the Sforza Castle, Milan, during remodeling shows two figures beneath the sun, with a wall behind. In the card they reach to each other with their arms, in that way resembling illustrations of the zodiacal sign of Gemini. At that point each of the celestial cards clearly have a zodiacal sign below the subject-object: the Star card, below the big star, has a figure like that of Aquarius, the water-bearer, and the Moon card has the large crayfish or lobster of the sign of Cancer. From a modern perspective, we would expect here two boys, Castor and Pollux. Actually, at that time the figures were also shown as male and female, as we can see below center. Ross Caldwell's reproduction of the right side of the card on the left, with some filling in of the sun image, shows that there is room enough on the Cary Sheet fragment for two figures.
"Sandy", again on THF, did a reconstruction (above right) based on the fact that the next known card, the one found in the wall of the Sforza Castle, in fact does have a male and a female on it,
as does the card of the earliest preserved TdM deck, that of Noblet in
c. 1660 Paris (second above, on the right). The Gemini illustration is from a 14th century book of hours. There are many like them, although most are not so sexually explicit. And below is a 1496 zodiac that not only has the male/female Gemini but also the crayfish for Cancer and the sexually ambiguous figure pouring from two jugs for Aquarius.
That the other figure was female fits the Minchiate images, both
of the Sun card and the sign of Gemini. The couple of Minchiate is repeated in the
Swiss tarot originally mid-19th century and still published by US Games. albeit the genders are rather ambiguous.They also appear in the Egyptian-style tarot designed by Wegener and Falconnier in 1896 and adopted by the Brotherhood of Light in the U.S.,
where it appears in color to this day, with the interpretation that the
marriage bond is key to success and happiness. The Wegener-Falconnier image is surely inspired by the famous "Denderah Zodiac" that was taken from Egypt and put on exhibit at the Louvre starting in the 1820s. In it the sign of Gemini is that of a man and woman holding hands.
This zodiac was then thought to be many thousands of years old. Subsequently it was realized that actually it was from the Ptolemaic period, when Egypt was ruled by Greeks who tried to merge their own culture, including that of the zodiac (borrowed from Babylonia), with traditional imagery of the Egyptian religion where possible. In fact the zodiac at Denderah dates from the very end of Greek rule, during the time of Cleopatra. It may well be that the diffusion of the images of that zodiac, or one similar, was responsible also for the new look of zodiacal imagery that occurred around the 14th century. It was about that time that the Mamluk rulers in Egypt, who were Muslim more in name than actuality, opened the country up to trade with Europe; such trade may well have included images traced on papyrus, just as are sold to tourists today. The Denderah zodiac, before its move to Paris, was in a small chapel on the roof of the temple, fairly easy to access.
At some point in the 17th century, if not sooner, the male-female pair representing Gemini died out, replaced by two males, as had been true in Greek and Roman times. As though corresponding, at some point on either side of 1700, the man and woman beneath the sun on the tarot card also was replaced by two males (at left, Dodal 1709, with the right figure somewhat ambiguous, and Chosson, either 1672, if the plates are as old as the date on the Two of Coins, or ca. 173, when Chosson was in business. An odd feature here is acharacteristically sad expression on both of their faces.When both are male, it might be explained in terms of the myth of Castor and Pollux. Although both had the same mother, Leda, Queen of Sparta, Pollux was born of Zeus and so was immortal, while Castor was born of the king of Sparta, and so was not. When the mortal one died, the immortal one was so
filled with grief that to be with his brother gave up half of his immortality--i.e., time in
Olympus--so that he could share both with his brother. They became patron saints of sailors and also were said to aid the Romans in battle. So the sad expressions would be their anticipation of separation before Zeus/Jupiter intervened. 
Reconstructions of the TdM have responded in various ways to the sadness on the two faces. Camoin and Jodorowsky (at right above) reproduce it precisely; the only change is in an odd wavy line he puts into the right hip of the figure on our left: it now looks like a tail, which was only a possible hint before. It is as though that one doubles as an animal to be sacrificed. In Dionysian rituals, if we are to believe the scenes on Roman-era sarcophagi, the animal was a young goat that was sacrificed at the end of the ceremonies. On one sarcophagus (below) the tail of the procession features two young men in postures like that on the tarot card. Perhaps the goat substitutes for one of them, in the way that Christ's sacrifice, to wash away the sins of the world, is characterized as that of the "lamb of God," the traditional Jewish animal sacrifice at that time of year. 
Other reconstructions modify the original in other ways. One way is to get rid of the suggestion of sadness. Compare for example the Bibliotheque Nationale's copy of the Sun card, from an early 19th century print using Conver's 1760 woodblocks (near right), to Yoav Ben Dov's 2011 reconstruction of it (far right). Ben Dov's is allegedly faithful to the original but in fact replaces the sadness with something more like fraternal regard.
For his part, Paul Marteau changed the expressions less, but unaccountably changed the direction of the drops (Marteau is at right, Conver at left). In the TdM style of the 17th and 18th century, the drops do not radiate from the sun in all directions, but ascend to the sun, just as the drops in the Moon card ascend to that body. That is consistent with the idea, from Plutarch and perhaps Kabbalah, that the spirit separates off from the soul and ascends higher, to the Sun, just as earlier in its journey the soul/spirit combination separated off from the body and rose to the Moon.
2. De Gebelin and after
Court de Gebelin, 1781, has precious little to say about the Sun card, just (p. 25 of Karlin's translation):
The Sun is represented here as :the physical father of Humans & and of all of Nature; he enlightens men in Society; he presides in their cities, concerning his rays distilling into tears of gold & pearls; thus we indicate the lucky influences of this star.He could have said much more about its significance for the ancient Egyptians. Their high god, to whom even Isis had to give homage, was the sun god Ra, who each day emerged from his perilous night-sea journey. He is also the means by which Isis and Osiris unite (the water, evaporating from the ocean because of the sun's rays, falling to earth and uniting with the land) and by whom their son Horus will become founder of the united kingdom of Egypt, the first pharaoh.
Etteilla is a little more expansive, but in much the same vein:
the Sun is the instrument by which the Creator appeared in order to light up the life of all Beings; as the Sun, it carried itself to all the Globes of our Universe. These Globes can be nothing other than the proper matrices to receive life, that one might compare to a fluid that contains and transfixes all of Nature, since it is the true spirit of the Lord, the Sun that vivifies all the embryos, enfuses itself so that all the Globes are necessarily people, or matrices, which the order of all things demonstrates: gold, and also coal, being matrices, from the moment that Nature animated them, or Art revived them.As such it was the second card, governed by the element of Fire, on the first day of creation.
Above are reproductions of the 1789 original, followed by its later variations, the Grand Etteilla II of 1840, and the Grand Etteilla III of c. 1870). What remains constant are the keywords: upright, Eclaircissement, and reversed, Feu, Enlightenment and Fire, with the following "synonyms and related meanings" added by one of his followers (these are found in the 1838 book by "Julia Orsini" (probably the publisher Simon Blocquel) introducing the Grand Etteilla II:
Upright: Light, Explanation.—Clarity. Heaven and Earth.— Untangling. Development. Instruction. Opening. Analysis. Discovery. Interpretation. Revelation. Elucidation. Fire. Sun. Temple of Heat.
Reversed.: Heat, Glimmer.—Conflagration.—Flame, Passions.—Meteors; Lightning Flash, Thunderbolt.—Inner, Outer, Central, . Warmth. Small illumination. Spark. Ray of light. Burning. To burn. Ardor. Fire of love. To light. Flash. Thunder. Lightning. Electricity. St. Elmo’s Fire. Fire of Nature. Magnetism. Salamander.
With Eliphas Levi the card takes a new direction. He describes it as (Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Waite trans. p. 369, in archive.org):
Hieroglyph, a radiant sun, and two naked children taking hands in a fortified enclosure. Other Tarots substitute a spinner unwinding destinies, and others, again, a naked child mounted on a white horse and displaying a scarlet standard.The first is his description of the TdM personages, who are neither precisely children nor holding hands. This description, however, was realized to some degree by Wirth (middle below), who, however, shrank from making the pair children. Case had no such scruples (at right). In the the second, "unwinding destinies" is a good description of Clotho doing the opposite of spinning. In the third, he has in mind either the Vieville or an 18th century Flemish descendant, such as that produced by Vandenborre at right. Neither has a naked child. That did not stop Waite from taking Levi's description as the basis for his own card (at left below).
Levi offers further commentary Book One, chapter 19, and the same in book Two. In the first he announces that "The ancients adored the Sun under the figure of a black stone" (Ibid., p. 152). In the next breath he tells us, "The disciples of Hermes, before promising their adepts the elixir of long life, or the powder of projection, counselled them to seek for the philosophical stone" (pp. 152-3). Just as Christ was the "cornerstone" of life everlasting and Peter the "stone" of the Church, this stone is the foundation of the work. In Book 2 he declares that it is "decomposed in analysis and recomposed by synthesis. In the analysis it is a powder, the alchemical powder of projection of the alchemists; before the analysis and after synthesis, it is the stone" (Waite trans., p. 335). It is "the fixation of the volatile" and the result of something comparable to lightning, which "falls rapidly to earth, where it is drawn by a fixed nature similar to its own" (p. 337). He adds (Ibid):
These words, enigmatic in form but clear in essence, express openly what the philosophers understand by their mercury fructified by sulphur, becoming the master and regenerator of salt ; it is AZOTH, universal magnesia, the great magical agent, the astral light, the light of life, fertilised by animic force, by intellectual energy, which they compare to sulphur on account of its affinities with divine fire.
Later he says of the Stone (p. 338):
Obtained by analysis, it may be termed the universal sublimate; recovered by the synthetic way, it is the veritable panacea of the ancients, for it cures all diseases, whether of soul or body, and is termed, in an eminent manner, the medicine of all nature.
It is also "sulphurated mercury or light of life, directed and rendered omnipotent by a secret operation" (Ibid). How any of this applies to the card he does not say.
Levi's follower, Paul Christian says of this card (p. 109) that it "expresses in the divine world the supreme Heaven, in the intellectual world sacred truth, and in the human world peaceful Happiness." He adds to Levi's description a circle of flowers that the pair stand in. "It is the symbol of happiness promised by the simple life and by moderation of all one's desires." The sun here is the light that "illuminates those who know how to use it and strikes down those who are ignorant of its power or abuse it."
The Sun reveals the reality of things and shows them as they really are without the veil of any illusion. . . . It is in this sense that the incarnated soul finds in the Sun its promised Redeemer. The soul is not condemned to struggle in the heart of matter except with a view of purifying itself in order to make possible the union of the spiritual, imprisoned in the flesh, with universal spirituality.That we see a "young couple" represents "the individual soul in harmony with the spirit whose feelings are married to reason." The wall represents that this is a new Eden, which requires protection against "the remaining barbarity which is brutal and opposed to man's brotherhood" (p. 142). Its colors are blue for emotion, yellow for intelligence, and red for spirit, all in harmony. A rain of fine gold descends on the pair; it is "the Gold of the Philosophers," such that "the children of light transform the vile lead of base instincts into pure gold, both moral and intellectual" (p. 143)
The card signifies, therefore, the transit from the manifest light of this world, represented by the glorious sun of earth, to the light of the world to come, which goes before aspiration and is typified by the heart of a child.
But the last allusion is again the key to a different form or aspect of the symbolism. The sun is that of consciousness in the spirit - the direct as the antithesis of the reflected light. The characteristic type of humanity has become a little child therein--a child in the sense of simplicity and innocence in the sense of wisdom. In that simplicity, he bears the seal of Nature and of Art; in that innocence, he signifies the restored world. When the self-knowing spirit has dawned in the consciousness above the natural mind, that mind in its renewal leads forth the animal nature in a state of perfect conformity.
So while the state is similar to that of the child, it is different in being self-conscious. He does not, at least here, explain the four sunflowers.
Paul Foster Case's card has the same four sunflowers, for him representing the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human worlds. There is also one more, for the spirit, he says. In The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages he explains (p. 192, in archive.org):
It is still in bud, and turns toward the sun. This bud represents the "Fifth Kingdom," the kingdom of the Spiritual Israel, composed of human beings who, by understanding the law of evolution which has brought organized life-expression as far as ordinary genus homo, is enabled to apply that law to the self-evolution of a "new creature," who is as far beyond ordinary humanity as the average human being is beyond the animals.
For him the card signifies "the regenerated personality" (Tarot Fundamentals, lesson 42, p. 8) as "spiritual humanity" (Ibid., p. 7). The wall represents truth in a material sense, which is true as far as it goes. The little girl, he says, is the subconscious regenerated as intuition. Her gesture with her free hand, as though pushing against the wall, is one of repudiation of the wall of materiality, complementing the little boy's gesture of acceptance of the spiritual. While in the natural world the subconscious (feminine) is subordinate to self-consciousness (masculine), the two are equal in the spiritual world (Ibid., p. 8). That they each have one foot in the light circle indicates that both are identified with the "indwelling, Central Self" (Ibid., p.7). The other foot is loose, to indicate that they are dancing. Their nudity signifies their life in the deeper truth behind sense-appearances, in which they have nothing to hide (p. 6); it also represents their "Edenic innocence" (Tarot: A Key, p. 194)
The drops in the shape of yod are "falling from the sun" (Tarot Fundamentals, lesson 42, p. 4), which represents "a synthesis of all the active forces entering into the composition of human personality . . . shown here as a living power, not as a merely physical energy" (Ibid.) It has human features to show the commonality between it and us. And this energy goes from us to the sun as well as the other way around: "Sun and man are lights on the same circuit of spiritual energy" (Ibid.).
At the end of the chapter devoted to the Sun card in The Tarot: a Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, Case gives a long quotation which he says is from the first edition of Waite's book, in which Waite applies the terms "self-consciousness" and "subconsciousness" to his boy on a horse: his right hand is the former and his left the latter, energy now passing in an automatic way, and he maintains his balance without need of a saddle by means of his outstretched right hand of self-consciousness. It is again the "regenerated personality, recognizing and affirming its unity with the Father, or Source of All. He . . . fares forth free and joyous on his journey home." (Case, The Tarot: a Key, p. 196.)
3. Jungian interpretations
For Jung the sun was most commonly an image of ego-consciousness. He says (Nietzsche seminar, pp. 15-17):
Yes, the sun surely is the symbol of the center of consciousness; it is the principle of consciousness because it is light. When you understand a thing, you say: "I see" - and in order to see you need light. The essence of understanding, of cognition, has always been symbolized by the all-seeing of the sun, the wisdom or omniscience of the sun that moves over the earth and sees everything in its light.
The all-seeing sun, high in the sky, is thus a kind of imagined super-consciousness, beyond that of a single human being. But the sun does not see what happens at night, or underground during the day. These are places dominated by unconsciousness. But underground is the solar metal, gold, and stored-up sunlight in the form of coal and oil. Mythologically, the sun itself goes on a "night-sea journey" to the underworld.
It is not possible to separate out the Sun as an archetype separate from the unconscious. It is merely one part of the duplex Mercurius, "by his very nature unconscious, where nothing can be differentiated; but as a spiritus vegatativus (living spirit), he is is an active principle and so must always appear in reality in differentiated form" (Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 97, paragraph 117, p. 97, in archive.org). The passive, unconscious part is Luna and the active part, consciousness, is called Sol. Jung says (Ibid.):
Consciousness requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness. Just as the day-star rises out of the nocturnal sea, so, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, consciousness is born of unconsciousness and sinks back every night to this primal condition. This duality of our psychic life is the prototype and archetype of the Sol-Luna symbolism.
After the underground and night scenes on the previous cards, the
interpretations given by the occultists in terms of rebirth can fit such
a conception. But here it is not simply "the sun" that is an archetype, but the "duality of our psychic life" captured by the Sol-Luna pair.
Physics would say that this shadow is the earth's, not the sun's. Is Maier cheating? Jung comments: "Without light, there is no shadow, so in a sense, the shadow, too, is emitted by the sun." Maier adds, "For what, in the end, is this sun without a shadow? The same as a bell without a clapper." Jung is pleased that Maier acknowledges the real existence of the shadow, which "is no mere privatio lucis" (absence of light). In another quotation, it even has to be extracted from the sun's rays!
For the alchemist Gerhard Dorn, the sun is also the cause of its corruption, as well as the curative agent. The destructive element is an "elemental fire . . . enkindled by an invisible Sun unknown to many, that is, the sun of the Philosophers." Jung concludes, reflecting on Dorn:
The sun is evidently an instrument in the physiological and psychological drama of return to the prima materia, the death that must be undergone if man is to get back to the original condition of the simple elements and attain the incorrupt nature of the pre-worldly paradise.
However, Jung adds later (para. 121, p. 100):
When we remember that the alchemical Sol corresponds psychologically to consciousness, the diurnal side of the psyche, we must add the Christ analogy to this symbolism.
That analogy immediately becomes quite complex. The son in alchemy proves to be Mercurius, born of Mercurius as Luna and Mercurius as Sol. As a result, "The redeemer figure of alchemy is not commensurate with Christ. . . . The 'bonum superexcedens' of God allows no integration of evil" (Ibid.)
In contrast to the paradisaical cards of the occultists, the "Marseille" twins look rather glum. Castor and Pollux got their wives by abduction their cattle by rustling. The mortal of the pair, Castor, was mortally wounded in one such raid. Destined for Hades, while Pollux would go to Olympus, it was only by Pollux's offering to give up half of his time in Olympus that Pollux could be there, too, each spending half the time in each place. Although the story was considered a prefiguration of Christ's sacrifice for humanity, there is no "bonum superexcedens" about them, or for most of the inseparable brothers in such stories.
Nichols uses as her main example the card of the Paul Marteau version of the Tarot of Marseille, finding there a playfulness and harmonious feeling. I don't see it there myself, or in any of the historic Marseille cards, as opposed to those of the occultists. For her it is a world of innocence. She cites Blake's "Songs of Innocence," in which the "tyger" lies down with the lamb (p. 327).
She is thinking of the therapeutic temenos, or sacred ground, where one can play with yearnings without bothering with realistic thinking, even give them expression in sensory terms, as in what Jungians call "sand-tray therapy," in which the analysand picks out toy figures and objects with which to populate a small sand-box, creating a little world in accord with what seems right at the moment (p. 328).
The walled garden of The Sun creates a similar kind of safe enclosure - a sacred temenos, or holy place, where something dark and hidden can safely be brought into the light. Only within such a consecrated space could the instinctual opposites (pictured before as howling beasts) emerge transformed as naked children.
By "howling beasts" she means the dog and wolf of the Moon
card. Without that card, and the ones before of it, of course, we could
not be where we are now.
It is also, she says, a place to exercise the "inferior function," that which is least adapted to the world and least developed, like a little child, but also closest to the unconscious, which is "where renewal can come." It is whatever is opposite to one's dominant function, among sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. Its development requires a safe place to play. She quotes Jungian analyst Louise von Franz (p. 329):
I think nobody can really develop the inferior function without first creating a temenos, namely a sacred grove, a hidden place where he can play.
It is a place where one's "inner censor" is silent, where the ego is not in control, and the inferior function can find the optimal place to express itself.
She imagines the two children interacting in a way that neither rebuffs the other nor misunderstands, made possible by their openness to each other. It is only when the two parts of oneself can express themselves that such harmony is conceivable; "Whenever we work on our dreams, we catch the spirit embedded in the unconscious and distill out its essence," she says (p. 331). In that way "The Sun pictures the hero's reconnection with his neglected self, which brings with it a direct experience of the illuminating godhead and transcendent life" (p. 329). It is experienced as the "eternal child," quoting Jung about this archetype (p. 330):
The child symbolizes the pre-conscious and the post-conscious essence of man. His pre-conscious essence is the unconscious state of earliest childhood; his post-conscious essence is an anticipation by analogy of life after death.
In that way the ego has a "heavenly twin," as suggested by the constellation of Gemini, the twins. While there were many such twins in mythology, each a little different. "Usually it symbolizes a creative potential of unusual proportions," for example Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome (p. 331). Another is that of Castor and Pollux, of whom "one is said to represent man and the other, his heavenly counterpart" (Ibid.).
The interaction between the two children is also a mystic marriage, a hierosgamos, of a brother-sister pair "embracing in the waters of the unconscious." She shows us a picture of two "children" copulating in an alchemical flask (detail at right; in full at left below). As for the incest, "Psychologically, incest represents one's relationship to himself. It takes place within one's own psychic family, so to speak" (p. 333).
In relation to this painting, I feel impelled to say that it is only the third picture out of twelve, and so may well correspond to the Lover card rather than the Sun, especially given that a winged child, like Cupid, hovers in the neck of the flask. They do not appear to be children, butg more the young adults typically seen in such poses in alchemical works. This work, the Prætiosissimum donum Dei, given to the 17th century by Gallica, where I get the image, has for its two final pictures a mature crowned woman and man, both clothed.As for the Sun itself, Nichols says, it is a symbol of the self. "As the self is the center of our inner skies, so the sun is the center around which our planetary system revolves" (Ibid.). Furthermore, the sun is not simply beneficent: the sun can be dangerous, too. Here she notes that on the Marseille cards the Sun's rays "are pictured as alternate sharp spears and snaky waves, representing the Creator as not whole beneficent but as the embodiment of all opposites" (Ibid; it seems to me that these lines merely convey energy.) There is even "a collar of black lines, which give an illusion of energetic motion to the sunburst. . . . Since black is created by combining all colors, these black lines may symbolize the ultimate union of all opposing forces to create pure energy." I do not know about energy, nor if "combining all colors" is a union of opposites, but the black lines do remind me of Maier's "shadow"; black is also traditionally the color of evil. The occultists removed the black.
In all cultures, Nichols continues, "the sun has carried the valence of a central supernal Being with which we feel intimately connected and toward which we feel something of a divine responsibility (pp. 333-4). Speaking of the Hopi, Jung found, when he visited their elders, that they considered their daily prayers essential to the rising of the sun each day, Nichols says (p. 334),
As these Indians realized, Western man has destroyed his intimate connection with nature, to the detriment of both mankind and nature. When man's relationship to nature is broken, the world becomes as sterile, dark, cold, and desolate as if the sun literally did not rise.
This seems for her to be true both literally and symbolically. On the literal level, we may think of the now-familiar issue of global warming, in which our upsetting of nature's balance in the atmosphere results in the upsetting of her beneficence. In a sense we are to nature as the Hopi are to the sun: our actions can destroy the balance in which all of nature, including humanity, came to be and thrive. Without the responsibility that the Hopi cultivate, it is we who are destroyed, while the sun will keep on shining. It seems fair to group nature and the Self together: we are a part of nature just as the ego is a part of the Self. The ego is not at the center of our ecological life. The collective unconscious is not merely human, but includes the world, as a kind of anima mundi, now the world unconscious. In relation to it, without existing in harmony with it, it is we who are destroyed, while the sun keeps on shining. 
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