Al Jabhah, the Forehead of the Lion

Al Jabhah is the tenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 115 to 128 degrees within Leo, at the forehead of the Lion near the royal star Regulus. Its name means the forehead. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Jupiter, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and building, favourable for affection and for founding and construction. The presence of Regulus, one of the four royal stars, lends the station weight in the electional tradition. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property drawn from the Arabic literature and transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition; the underlying stars are those of the Lion's head and the bright Regulus, which the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit.

Al Jabhah takes its name from the Lion's forehead and is anchored by Regulus, one of the brightest stars used in the whole manazil scheme and, as one of the four Persian royal stars, a point of unusual weight in the wider fixed-star tradition quite apart from its role here. The Picatrix's instructions for mansions containing especially bright or well-known stars, Al Jabhah among them, are generally recorded in fuller detail in the surviving manuscripts than for the fainter stations, which several historians of Arabic astral magic take as evidence that these mansions saw heavier practical use, though the unevenness of manuscript survival makes that inference difficult to confirm with certainty.