Al Fargh al Thani

Al Fargh al Thani is the twenty-seventh lunar mansion, spanning roughly 334 to 347 degrees within Pisces. Its name means the second or rear spout, the companion of the previous mansion, again formed by stars of the Great Square of Pegasus. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mercury, and its traditional talismanic virtue is harvest and revenue, favourable for reaping and for income. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic literature, used in 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 claims about the stars, which here are the remaining corners of the Square of Pegasus that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Al Fargh al Thani completes the bucket-mouth image begun at Al Fargh al Mukdim, its own identifying stars, gamma Pegasi and alpha Andromedae, drawn from the remaining two corners of the same Great Square of Pegasus. The harvest and revenue given as this mansion's virtue, alongside Al Fargh al Mukdim's union and health, continues the pattern seen throughout the series of the manazil's magical properties shifting sharply between immediately adjacent stations even when, as here, the two mansions share the very same underlying asterism read as two halves of one image.

Where the zodiac cuts the ecliptic into twelve, the manazil cut it into twenty eight, and the number comes from the Moon's daily motion rather than from any figure in the sky. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Fargh al Thani is the twenty seventh of them, running from 4 degrees 17 minutes of Pisces to 17 degrees 09 minutes of Pisces. The Moon's mean daily motion of about thirteen degrees eleven minutes is slightly more than one mansion, so it completes the circuit of all twenty eight in the sidereal month of twenty seven and a third days, not in the twenty nine and a half of the synodic month the phases follow.

The Arabic manazil al qamar reached Latin Europe through translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the magical use of the mansions travelled with the astronomical scheme rather than after it. Agrippa set out all twenty eight with their degrees and their operations in the second book of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and that chapter, not any Arabic original, is where almost every later English language list comes from. Al Fargh al Thani is a transliteration, and the spellings vary widely between sources.

There is a problem in those degrees that the printed lists rarely flag. The mansions are named for star groups, but the boundaries above are measured in the tropical zodiac, anchored to the equinox, which drifts against the stars at about one degree every seventy two years. The Arabic scheme was fixed to the stars themselves. Something close to twenty degrees of precession has accumulated since the medieval transmission, so a mansion's tropical degrees no longer contain the stars it is named after. Both readings are in circulation and neither is a misprint.