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Al Haqa, the Mansion Near Orion

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Al Haqa, the Mansion Near Orion

Al Haqa is the fifth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 51 to 64 degrees within Taurus and Gemini, in the region of the stars at the head of Orion. Its name refers to a white spot, an asterism of faint stars there. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is return and health, favourable for homecomings, recovery, and the mending of what was lost. The twenty-eight mansions each carry such a fixed magical property from the Arabic manazil tradition, used in the timing of images and talismans and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition; the underlying stars are the modest group near Orion's head that the manazil scheme counts at this station.

Al Haqa's name, referring to a faint white mark, is glossed in some medieval Arabic star-lists as al-haq'ah, the whiteness or the mark on a horse's forehead, an image reused from ordinary Bedouin descriptive vocabulary for horses and camels rather than drawn from any distinct mythological figure, which is typical of several of the fainter manazil whose names describe the visual impression of a star group rather than narrate a story about it. The mansion's position near the head of Orion places it close to the boundary the Indian scheme reckons as the end of Mrigashira, a further instance of the rough correspondence, though never exact agreement, between manazil and nakshatra boundaries as the Moon's circuit is cut by twenty-eight against twenty-seven divisions.

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Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
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