Al Simak is the fourteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 167 to 180 degrees within Virgo, and it contains the brilliant star Spica, one of the brightest along the ecliptic. Its name refers to the unarmed one, distinguishing Spica from a neighbouring star. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Saturn, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and healing, favourable for affection and for the mending of the sick. The mansion sits at the exact midpoint of the circle, closing the first half. 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 tradition; the underlying star is Spica, a first-magnitude marker used in the calendars of many ancient peoples.
Al Simak's name distinguishes Spica, al-simak al-a'zal, the unarmed simak, from Arcturus, al-simak al-ramih, the armed simak or the lancer, a paired naming convention across two different manazil-adjacent bright stars that reflects a broader Arabic habit of naming prominent stars in contrasting pairs. Spica's position closing the first half of the twenty-eight-station circle at almost exactly 180 degrees gives this mansion a structural prominence beyond its stellar brightness alone, roughly analogous to the way the Indian scheme reads its own midpoint mansions, though the two systems' midpoints do not fall at the same degree because of the twenty-eight against twenty-seven division.