Al Dhira, the Forearm of the Twins

Al Dhira is the seventh lunar mansion, spanning roughly 77 to 90 degrees within Gemini, in the region of the bright stars Castor and Pollux. Its name means the forearm, referring to those two stars as the outstretched arm of the constellation. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Saturn, and its traditional talismanic virtue is gain and love, favourable for winning affection and profit. Each of the twenty-eight mansions carries such a property from the Arabic manazil tradition, used in electional and talismanic magic and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that tradition; the underlying stars are the twin luminaries of Gemini, Castor and Pollux, which the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit.

Al Dhira takes its name directly from the two bright stars Castor and Pollux read as an outstretched forearm, and this mansion is among the small number of manazil, alongside Al Thurayya at the Pleiades, whose identifying stars are bright and essentially undisputed across every surviving source, in contrast to several fainter mansions where medieval Arabic star-catalogues disagree on the exact stars intended. The same twin stars anchor the Indian nakshatra Punarvasu a short distance away, another point where the two twenty-eight and twenty-seven-fold schemes fall close together without ever aligning exactly, since Al Dhira's roughly 77 to 90 degree span and Punarvasu's 80 to 93 degree 20 minute span overlap only partially.