Al Iklil

Al Iklil is the seventeenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 205 to 218 degrees within Scorpio. Its name means the crown, an arc of stars at the head of the Scorpion. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Jupiter, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and fortune, favourable for winning affection and good luck. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic literature, used in electional and talismanic magic and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than statements about the stars, which here are the curving line at the Scorpion's brow that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage through the ecliptic.

Al Iklil's crown of stars at the Scorpion's brow is usually identified with beta, delta and pi Scorpii, a compact arc bright enough to be reliably identified across the medieval Arabic sources, unlike several of the fainter manazil discussed elsewhere in the series. Jupiter's rulership here, paired with a virtue of love and fortune, gives Al Iklil one of the more straightforwardly benefic profiles among the twenty-eight, a contrast with its immediate neighbour Al Qalb at the Scorpion's heart, whose Mars rulership and discordant virtue mark one of the sharper thematic shifts between adjacent stations anywhere in the sequence.

A mansion is a night's travel. The system exists because the Moon covers roughly one twenty eighth of the circle between one nightfall and the next. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Iklil is the seventeenth of them, running from 25 degrees 43 minutes of Libra to 8 degrees 34 minutes of Scorpio. 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 Iklil 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.