Al Awwa

Al Awwa is the thirteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 154 to 167 degrees within Virgo. Its name is glossed as the barker or the howler, an asterism of stars in the Virgin. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mercury, and its traditional talismanic virtue is benevolence and gain, favourable for kindness returned and for profit. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, used for the timing of talismans and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic literature rather than statements about the stars, which here are the group in Virgo that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage.

Al Awwa's name, the barker or the howler, is obscure even within the medieval Arabic tradition itself, with commentators disagreeing on whether it describes the sound of a dog, a more general cry, or is simply a descriptive label whose original referent had already been lost by the time the classical manazil lists were compiled; this kind of etymological uncertainty is more common among the fainter Virgo-region mansions than among the bright, well-attested stations such as Al Simak immediately following it. Its virtue of benevolence and gain places it, like Al Zubrah before it, among the commercially and socially favourable manazil rather than the harsher stations assigned to discord, siege or revenge found elsewhere in the twenty-eight.

The twenty eight mansions divide the ecliptic by the Moon rather than by the Sun, and that single choice is what makes the scheme unlike the zodiac beside it. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Awwa is the thirteenth of them, running from 4 degrees 17 minutes of Virgo to 17 degrees 09 minutes of Virgo. The Moon's mean daily motion of about thirteen degrees eleven minutes is slightly more than one mansion, so it completes the circuit of all twenty eight in the sidereal month of twenty seven and a third days, not in the twenty nine and a half of the synodic month the phases follow.

The Arabic manazil al qamar reached Latin Europe through translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the magical use of the mansions travelled with the astronomical scheme rather than after it. Agrippa set out all twenty eight with their degrees and their operations in the second book of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and that chapter, not any Arabic original, is where almost every later English language list comes from. Al Awwa is a transliteration, and the spellings vary widely between sources.

There is a problem in those degrees that the printed lists rarely flag. The mansions are named for star groups, but the boundaries above are measured in the tropical zodiac, anchored to the equinox, which drifts against the stars at about one degree every seventy two years. The Arabic scheme was fixed to the stars themselves. Something close to twenty degrees of precession has accumulated since the medieval transmission, so a mansion's tropical degrees no longer contain the stars it is named after. Both readings are in circulation and neither is a misprint.