This article considers the image of the sun in Georges Bataille’s philosophy and its position in relation to his theory of the sacred. The author puts forward the hypothesis that the sun as a conceptual metaphor accumulates meanings, notions, and intuitions that are later attributed to the sacred and are finally inscribed in its composition. Among the probable points of intersection the following concepts are considered: the ambivalence of the sacred, loss of subjectivity as religion’s main point, the unreal, the monstrous, the opposition of heterogeneous/homogeneous, violence, death, etc. The conclusion is drawn that the sun expresses the human being’s violent transition to another state, which could be associated with the opposite side of reality, i.e. with the sacred. The author also analyzes the role of this image in Bataille’s epistemology, which interprets cognition as religious ecstasy and the destruction of the subject-object relation with its object in favor of identification with it. Toward the end of the article the image of the sun’s place in the philosopher’s later work is considered, and it is concluded that it is inscribed in the structure of the sacred via the concepts of sacrifice and expenditure.