Al Thurayya, the Mansion of the Pleiades

Al Thurayya is the third lunar mansion, spanning roughly 25 to 38 degrees of the ecliptic across the Aries-Taurus border. Its name is the Arabic for the Pleiades, the bright star cluster it contains, the same asterism the Vedic tradition counts as the nakshatra Krittika, a rare point where the two lunar-mansion systems name the same visible stars. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Jupiter, and its traditional talismanic virtue is favour and harvest, promising increase and the good will of others. The magical property, like that of every mansion, was fixed in the Arabic manazil literature and carried into Latin through the Picatrix and Agrippa for the timing of talismans. These are the conventions of that tradition; the underlying cluster is the Pleiades, prominent in the calendars of many ancient peoples.

Because Al Thurayya shares its underlying stars with the nakshatra Krittika, the two systems agree exactly at this one point in the circle even though their overall degree divisions, twenty-eight equal stations against twenty-seven, drift apart everywhere else; it is one of the clearest concrete illustrations of the deep kinship between the manazil and the nakshatras that this atlas's entry on the first mansion discusses more fully. The Pleiades' heliacal rising was also a marker in the pre-Islamic Arabian anwa' calendar independent of its later role in this talismanic scheme, used to anticipate seasonal weather changes across the Arabian peninsula in a practical tradition that predates and stands apart from the mansion magic recorded by the Picatrix and Agrippa.