Al Tarf

Al Tarf is the ninth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 102 to 115 degrees within Cancer and Leo. Its name means the glance or the eye, referring to stars at the eye of the Lion. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Moon, and its traditional talismanic virtue is discord and hindrance, one of the mansions assigned to works of obstruction and separation. 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 tradition rather than statements about the stars, which here are the group at the head of Leo that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Al Tarf's name, the glance or the eye, is usually identified with the faint stars epsilon and lambda Leonis at the Lion's face, a fainter marking than the bright Regulus that anchors the mansion immediately following it, and the mansion is one of several in the series whose identifying stars are described with some inconsistency between medieval Arabic sources, a recurring feature of the fainter manazil noted also at Al Haqa and Al Hana. Both Al Tarf's talismanic virtue of discord and hindrance and its neighbour Al Jabhah's virtue of love and building show how sharply the manazil's fixed magical properties could shift from one thirteen-degree station to the next, with no necessary continuity of theme along the Lion's body from eye to forehead to mane.

Where the zodiac cuts the ecliptic into twelve, the manazil cut it into twenty eight, and the number comes from the Moon's daily motion rather than from any figure in the sky. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Tarf is the ninth of them, running from 12 degrees 51 minutes of Cancer to 25 degrees 43 minutes of Cancer. 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 Tarf 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.