Al Zubana, the Claws of the Scorpion

Al Zubana is the sixteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 192 to 205 degrees within Libra. Its name means the claws, for these stars were anciently reckoned the claws of the Scorpion before Libra was drawn as a separate balance. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Moon, and its traditional talismanic virtue is redemption and hindrance, the ransoming of a captive and the blocking of an enemy. 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 stars are those of Libra, once counted as the Scorpion's claws, which the twenty-eight-mansion scheme places at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit.

Al Zubana's identification of its stars, now assigned to Libra, as the Scorpion's claws preserves a genuinely older constellation figure: Libra was carved out of Scorpius as an independent sign only in the Roman period, and the manazil name, fixed earlier, still remembers the stars' original role as part of the Scorpion rather than as an independent set of balance-scales, exactly the point discussed in the Zodiac table's own entry on Libra's claws. The mansion's virtue of redemption and hindrance, ransom of the captive alongside the blocking of an enemy, again shows the Picatrix's characteristic pairing of a positive and a negative application within one station's fixed magical property.