Al Jabhah

Al Jabhah is the tenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 115 to 128 degrees within Leo, at the forehead of the Lion near the royal star Regulus. Its name means the forehead. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Jupiter, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and building, favourable for affection and for founding and construction. The presence of Regulus, one of the four royal stars, lends the station weight in the electional tradition. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property drawn from the Arabic literature and transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition; the underlying stars are those of the Lion's head and the bright Regulus, which the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit.

Al Jabhah takes its name from the Lion's forehead and is anchored by Regulus, one of the brightest stars used in the whole manazil scheme and, as one of the four Persian royal stars, a point of unusual weight in the wider fixed-star tradition quite apart from its role here. The Picatrix's instructions for mansions containing especially bright or well-known stars, Al Jabhah among them, are generally recorded in fuller detail in the surviving manuscripts than for the fainter stations, which several historians of Arabic astral magic take as evidence that these mansions saw heavier practical use, though the unevenness of manuscript survival makes that inference difficult to confirm with certainty.

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 Jabhah is the tenth of them, running from 25 degrees 43 minutes of Cancer to 8 degrees 34 minutes of Leo. 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 Jabhah 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.