Lunar mansions: the Moon's twenty-eight stations

The Sun takes a year to go round the zodiac; the Moon takes a little over twenty-seven days. Long before anyone wrote about signs, people who watched the night sky noticed that the Moon seems to stop each night beside a different group of stars. Divide her circuit into those nightly stops and you have the lunar mansions — in Arabic manāzil al-qamar, the Moon's stopping places, as a caravan stops at a well.

The Qurʾān uses the same image: "And for the Moon We have appointed mansions, until she returns like an old curved palm-stalk" (36:39), and of the Sun and Moon together, that God "appointed for it mansions, so that you might know the number of the years and the reckoning" (10:5). For Muslim scholars the mansions were first of all a way of telling time.

This lesson shows you how the mansions are counted, what the old books said about each one, and what you will see in the Almanac's Moon panel.

Where they came from

India divided the Moon's path into twenty-seven nakshatras (sometimes twenty-eight). Long before Islam, the Arabs of the peninsula kept a calendar of rain stars, the anwāʾ — star groups whose setting at dawn marked the seasons and, it was said, their weather. When the Indian and Greek ideas of lunar stations reached Baghdad, the two met. The stations were set at twenty-eight, and given the names of the old Arabian star groups: al-Thurayyā, the Pleiades; al-Dabarān, "the follower", which is Aldebaran; al-Qalb, "the heart" of the Scorpion, which is Antares.

The mansions passed into Latin in the twelfth century, and you will find them in the Renaissance magician Cornelius Agrippa, in the almanacs, and in the twentieth-century French astrologer Alexandre Volguine's study of them.

How they are counted

There are two ways, and it is worth knowing both.

• By equal division of the zodiac. Twenty-eight equal parts of 360° are 12°51′26″ each. The first mansion begins at 0° Aries, so mansions 8, 15 and 22 begin exactly at the other cardinal points: 0° Cancer, 0° Libra and 0° Capricorn. This is how the Picatrix, Ibn Abī al-Rijāl, Agrippa and Ibn ʿArabī count them, and it is what the Almanac uses.
• By the stars themselves. The star groups that gave the mansions their names have slipped about one whole mansion since the system was fixed, because of the slow wobble of the Earth's axis (the precession of the equinoxes). Today the two stars of al-Sharaṭān, the first mansion, lie near 4° Taurus. Someone who counts the mansions by the stars — a sidereal count — will usually find the Moon one mansion further back.

Neither is wrong; they answer different questions. The equal count keeps the mansions in step with the seasons and the signs. The star count keeps them on the stars they are named after. The Indian nakshatras are a third, separate scheme of twenty-seven divisions of 13°20′, so their boundaries do not match either.

Because the Moon moves about 13° a day, she stays in each mansion for roughly a day, a little less when she is fast and a little more when she is slow.

What the old books said

The mansions were used mostly for elections: choosing a day to begin something. Lists of what each mansion favours and what it advises against survive in the Picatrix and in Ibn Abī al-Rijāl's eleventh-century Book of the Judgements of the Stars, which records what he calls the opinion of the Indians. They are practical, sometimes surprising — digging wells, buying animals, beginning a course of treatment, setting children to their lessons, putting on new clothes.

The old authors also called each mansion fortunate, unfortunate or mixed. Those labels are a summary, and the sources do not always agree: one book's mixed is another's fortunate. Where the Almanac shows a mansion's character, read it as the old opinion and nothing more. A mansion is one small voice in an election, weighed alongside the Moon's phase, her aspects, the sign she is in and the planetary hour — never a rule by itself. (For those other voices, see The Moon in the almanac and Planetary hours.)

We have left out the parts of the old lists that belong to their own time and harm others — talismans to bring down enemies, the capture of fugitives and the like. What remains is the gentle core: when to plant, build, travel, heal, mend a friendship, learn.

Two sets of names

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

By its Arabic name. This is the astronomer's and the almanac-maker's name — al-Nathra, al-Ṭarf, al-Jabha — usually a picture drawn from the stars: the Lion's nose, his eye, his forehead.

By its Divine Name. The great Andalusian mystic Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), in his Meccan Revelations (al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, chapter 198), sets out a vision of creation unfolding through the Breath of the All-Merciful. In it, each of the twenty-eight mansions stands beside one of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet, one of twenty-eight levels of existence — from the first Intellect down to the human being — and one of twenty-eight Names of God: al-Badīʿ, the Originator, beside the first mansion; al-Bāʿith, the Raiser, beside the second; and so on down to Rafīʿ al-Darajāt, the Raiser of Degrees, beside the last. The letters run in the order the voice makes them, from the throat to the lips.

Ibn ʿArabī was careful about which way this runs. People imagine, he says, that there are twenty-eight letters because there are twenty-eight mansions; for him it is the reverse. The Divine Names are not rulers of the mansions, and they carry no election rules. They are a contemplative way of seeing the same station of the Moon — a reminder, for those who want one, of what the mansion points beyond. Choosing them changes the name you see, not the old advice about what the day favours.

Some of the Names may be unfamiliar, and three of them — al-Qābiḍ, the Withholder; al-Mumīt, the Giver of Death; al-Mudhill, the Abaser — may sound stark out of context. In Islamic tradition they are paired with their opposites (the Expander, the Giver of Life, the Exalter), and Ibn ʿArabī places the Giver of Life and the Giver of Death in neighbouring mansions on purpose. They describe God, not the day.

The twenty-eight mansions

Using it

Open the Almanac on any day and the Moon panel tells you which mansion she is in, and when she moves on. Try watching it for one month. Notice that the mansion changes about once a day, that it runs round with the signs, and that the same mansion comes back a little before the Moon returns to the same phase.

If you keep a journal, note the mansion beside the day. Over a few cycles you may find some of the old associations ring true for you and others do not — which is exactly how the tradition was built, and exactly how far it should be trusted. The Moon inclines; she does not decree.

Next, the lots: how the astrologers of Baghdad turned a handful of calculated points into a catalogue of more than a hundred.