Al Ghafr

Al Ghafr is the fifteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 180 to 192 degrees within Virgo and Libra. Its name means the covering or the veil, an asterism of faint stars. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Sun, and its traditional talismanic virtue is discord and treasure, an unusual pairing the tradition assigned to both the sowing of strife and the finding of hidden wealth. 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 faint group along the Virgo-Libra border that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Al Ghafr's name, the covering or the veil, describes an asterism of faint stars in Virgo whose exact identification varies somewhat between medieval Arabic sources, another of the manazil, like Al Haqa and Al Hana, named for visual impression rather than myth. Its paired virtue of discord and treasure, strife and hidden wealth bound together in a single mansion, is one of several instances in the series where the Picatrix tradition assigns what look to modern readers like contradictory properties to one station, a pattern the medieval magical literature treats as entirely ordinary, since a single mansion's rulership was understood to cover more than one possible working rather than a single fixed meaning.

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 Ghafr is the fifteenth of them, running from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Libra to 12 degrees 51 minutes of Libra. 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 Ghafr 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.