Al Nathrah, the Mansion of the Manger

Al Nathrah is the eighth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 90 to 102 degrees within Cancer, in the region of the faint cluster Praesepe, the Manger. Its name refers to that nebulous patch and the two flanking stars called the Asses. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Sun, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and imprisonment, a mansion the tradition used both to bind affection and to hold a thing fast. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic literature rather than claims about the stars, which here are the modest cluster in Cancer that later Western astronomy also knew as the Beehive.

Al Nathrah's name for the nebulous patch of Praesepe and its two flanking stars, called the Aselli or Asses in the Greco-Roman tradition that used the same cluster as a weather sign, shows the same patch of sky read through at least three independent naming traditions, Arabic manzil, Greco-Roman folk astronomy, and the Indian nakshatra Pushya, each assigning it a different name and a different symbolic reading without any one derived from the others. The Picatrix's assignment of love and imprisonment together to this mansion, binding used for both affection and confinement, reflects a broader pattern in the talismanic literature where a single mansion's virtue often yokes a benevolent and a coercive application under one heading rather than treating them as opposites.