Al Sarfah, the Changer of the Weather

Al Sarfah is the twelfth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 141 to 154 degrees within Leo and Virgo. Its name means the changer or turner, said to mark the turn of the season and the weather, and it is identified with the bright star Denebola at the Lion's tail. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is harvest and commerce, favourable for reaping and for trade. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa for the timing of talismans. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition; the underlying star is Denebola, which the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit through the ecliptic.

Al Sarfah's identification with Denebola and its name, the changer or the turner, both point to the same underlying observation, that the star's rising or setting coincided in the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar with a turn in the season and the weather, tying this specific mansion directly to the practical anwa' tradition of star-based weather forecasting rather than only to the talismanic magic recorded by the Picatrix and Agrippa. The pairing of harvest and commerce as its magical virtue is consistent with that seasonal-turn naming, since a star marking the shift toward autumn would naturally accumulate associations with the agricultural and mercantile activity that followed the turn in the weather.