Al Naaim

Al Naaim is the twentieth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 244 to 257 degrees within Sagittarius. Its name means the ostriches, two groups of stars imagined as birds at a river. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mercury, and its traditional talismanic virtue is taming and petitions, the subduing of beasts or people and the granting of requests. 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 rather than statements about the stars, which here are the groups in Sagittarius, near the Milk Dipper, that the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage through the ecliptic.

Al Naaim's two groups of ostrich-stars, going to and returning from a river in the traditional Arabic image, are identified with stars in Sagittarius near what later Western atlases call the Milk Dipper, an asterism formed from the same stars that make up part of the modern constellation's familiar teapot shape. The pairing of taming and petitions as this mansion's virtue, the subduing of beasts or people alongside the granting of requests, connects the practical Bedouin association of ostriches as creatures to be hunted or domesticated with the more abstract magical theme of bringing something wild or resistant under control, whether an animal, a person, or a request awaiting a favourable answer.

A mansion is a night's travel. The system exists because the Moon covers roughly one twenty eighth of the circle between one nightfall and the next. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Naaim is the twentieth of them, running from 4 degrees 17 minutes of Sagittarius to 17 degrees 09 minutes of Sagittarius. 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 Naaim 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.