Al Tarf, the Glance of the Lion

Al Tarf is the ninth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 102 to 115 degrees within Cancer and Leo. Its name means the glance or the eye, referring to stars at the eye of the Lion. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Moon, and its traditional talismanic virtue is discord and hindrance, one of the mansions assigned to works of obstruction and separation. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, used for the timing of talismans and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than statements about the stars, which here are the group at the head of Leo that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Al Tarf's name, the glance or the eye, is usually identified with the faint stars epsilon and lambda Leonis at the Lion's face, a fainter marking than the bright Regulus that anchors the mansion immediately following it, and the mansion is one of several in the series whose identifying stars are described with some inconsistency between medieval Arabic sources, a recurring feature of the fainter manazil noted also at Al Haqa and Al Hana. Both Al Tarf's talismanic virtue of discord and hindrance and its neighbour Al Jabhah's virtue of love and building show how sharply the manazil's fixed magical properties could shift from one thirteen-degree station to the next, with no necessary continuity of theme along the Lion's body from eye to forehead to mane.