Al Iklil, the Crown of the Scorpion

Al Iklil is the seventeenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 205 to 218 degrees within Scorpio. Its name means the crown, an arc of stars at the head of the Scorpion. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Jupiter, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and fortune, favourable for winning affection and good luck. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic literature, used in electional and talismanic magic and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than statements about the stars, which here are the curving line at the Scorpion's brow that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage through the ecliptic.

Al Iklil's crown of stars at the Scorpion's brow is usually identified with beta, delta and pi Scorpii, a compact arc bright enough to be reliably identified across the medieval Arabic sources, unlike several of the fainter manazil discussed elsewhere in the series. Jupiter's rulership here, paired with a virtue of love and fortune, gives Al Iklil one of the more straightforwardly benefic profiles among the twenty-eight, a contrast with its immediate neighbour Al Qalb at the Scorpion's heart, whose Mars rulership and discordant virtue mark one of the sharper thematic shifts between adjacent stations anywhere in the sequence.