Lunar mansions (manāzil al-qamar)

What they are

The Sun takes a year to go round the zodiac; the Moon takes a little over twenty-seven days. So where the Sun's year is divided into twelve signs, the Moon's month was divided into twenty-eight mansions — in Arabic manāzil al-qamar, "the Moon's stopping-places", the word used for the halts of a caravan. Roughly, the Moon stays one night in each.

Each mansion was first a group of stars near the Moon's path: the Pleiades, Aldebaran, the Twins, the heart of the Scorpion. The Qurʾān speaks of them twice — "and the Moon We have measured out in stations, until it returns like an old palm-stalk" (36:39), and the Sun and Moon given stations "so that you may know the number of years and the reckoning" (10:5) — which is why they stayed in use in the Islamic world as a calendar long after other parts of astrology were disputed.

How they are counted

In the medieval tables each mansion is an equal 12°51′26″ of the tropical zodiac (360° ÷ 28), the first beginning at 0° Aries. Seven mansions fill each quarter, so the 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd begin exactly at the starts of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn. This is the division of Picatrix, of Ibn Abī al-Rijāl (Haly Abenragel) and of Agrippa, and it is the one the app uses.

The stars themselves have drifted forward by precession since the tables were drawn up — about a whole mansion. Al-Sharaṭān's stars, the horns of the Ram, now lie near 4° Taurus. Some practitioners therefore count the mansions by the stars, in the sidereal zodiac; the result runs roughly one mansion behind.

The mansions are a cousin of India's nakshatras, not a copy: the nakshatras are twenty-seven, and the two lists share some stars but not all. Al-Bīrūnī, who knew both, pointed out that writers who said the Indians had twenty-eight and dropped one had it backwards.

How they were used

Mostly for elections — choosing a moment to begin. The lists in Picatrix and Ibn Abī al-Rijāl say, mansion by mansion, what the Moon there was thought to favour: a journey, a building, sowing, a marriage, a partnership, a course of medicine. Al-Ṣarfa, for example, was counted good for beginning to build and for marriage; al-Zubānā, the Scorpion's claws, was counted poor for most beginnings. The same sources add that the Moon must also be well placed — not combust, not afflicted — for any of it to hold. Picatrix also gives each mansion images for talismans; that material, much of it aimed against other people, is not something we reproduce.

As always, a mansion is a leaning in the day, not an instruction: a good station does not make a poor plan good, and a difficult one does not forbid a needed task.

Two sets of names

The app can show each mansion in one of two ways.

By its Arabic name — al-Sharaṭān, "the two signs"; al-Thurayyā, the Pleiades; al-Qalb, "the heart". These names come from the older Arabian sky-lore of rain stars, and most describe a figure in the stars.

By a Divine Name. In chapter 198 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, on the "Breath of the All-Merciful", the Andalusian Sufi master Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) describes twenty-eight levels of existence brought into being by twenty-eight Names of God. To each Name he gives one level, one letter of the Arabic alphabet — the letters in order of where they sound in the mouth, from the hamza deep in the throat to wāw at the lips — and one lunar mansion. The first mansion belongs to al-Badīʿ, the Originator, and to the First Intellect; the last to Rafīʿ al-Darajāt, the Raiser of Degrees. Ibn ʿArabī adds that it is the letters that give the mansions their number, not the other way round.

This is a contemplative scheme, not an astrological rulership: it says nothing about what to do on a given day. In the app the Name is offered as a quiet companion to the Moon's station, with its meaning beside it.

The twenty-eight

Related

• The Moon
• Rain stars (anwāʾ)
• Nakshatra
• Electional astrology
• Astrology in the Arabic tradition
• Fixed stars