Al Dabaran

Al Dabaran is the fourth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 38 to 51 degrees within Taurus. Its name means the follower, because its chief star, Aldebaran, the red eye of the Bull, rises following the Pleiades across the sky. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mars, and its traditional talismanic virtue is destruction and discord, one of the mansions the tradition assigned to works of separation and undoing. Aldebaran is one of the four royal stars of Persian astronomy, and the mansion inherits some of that first-magnitude weight. The magical attribution belongs to the Arabic manazil literature transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of the talismanic tradition rather than claims about the star, which is a red giant long used as a seasonal and navigational marker.

Al Dabaran's identifying star, Aldebaran, carries an Arabic name, al-dabaran, meaning the follower, that passed essentially unchanged into the European vocabulary of astronomy, one of relatively few Arabic star names to survive into modern usage in something close to its original form rather than in a corrupted or partially translated version. The mansion's talismanic assignment to destruction and discord sits in some tension with Aldebaran's status as one of the four Persian royal stars and its generally auspicious reputation elsewhere in the fixed-star tradition, a reminder that the manazil's magical virtues were fixed by a separate transmission from the delineations given to the same stars under the Ptolemaic fixed-star doctrine catalogued individually elsewhere in this atlas.

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 Dabaran is the fourth of them, running from 8 degrees 34 minutes of Taurus to 21 degrees 26 minutes of Taurus. 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 Dabaran 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.