Al Sharatain

Al Sharatain is the first of the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the manazil al-qamar, the stations through which the Moon passes in its monthly circuit as reckoned in the Arabic and later Western tradition. These are distinct from the twenty-seven Vedic nakshatras, though both divide the ecliptic by the Moon: here the circle is cut into twenty-eight segments of roughly 12 degrees 51 minutes each, and this mansion opens the series at 0 degrees. Its name refers to the two horns of the Ram, the stars beta and gamma Arietis. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Sun, and its traditional talismanic virtue is given as journeys and discord. The magical use of the mansions, engraving an image while the Moon stands in a given station, was transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than statements about the stars.

The relationship between this system and its two sibling lunar-zodiacs deserves an honest account, since it remains a genuinely open scholarly question. The twenty-eight Arabic manazil, the twenty-seven Indian nakshatras, and the twenty-eight Chinese xiu all divide the ecliptic by the Moon's own monthly circuit, and Babylonian astronomy is often proposed as a common ancestor behind all three, but the transmission history has never been settled, scholars having argued for transmission in more than one direction and for independent development from a shared source. The manazil also carry their own medieval Arabic layer distinct from the other two: the anwa', a pre-Islamic system of weather and farming timing keyed to stars' heliacal rising. These stations have sometimes been mislabelled Vedic elsewhere; the manazil are Arabic, close to but distinct from the Indian nakshatras.

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 Sharatain is the first of them, running from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Aries to 12 degrees 51 minutes of Aries. 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 Sharatain 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.