Al Awwa, the Mansion of the Barker

Al Awwa is the thirteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 154 to 167 degrees within Virgo. Its name is glossed as the barker or the howler, an asterism of stars in the Virgin. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mercury, and its traditional talismanic virtue is benevolence and gain, favourable for kindness returned and for profit. 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 literature rather than statements about the stars, which here are the group in Virgo that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage.

Al Awwa's name, the barker or the howler, is obscure even within the medieval Arabic tradition itself, with commentators disagreeing on whether it describes the sound of a dog, a more general cry, or is simply a descriptive label whose original referent had already been lost by the time the classical manazil lists were compiled; this kind of etymological uncertainty is more common among the fainter Virgo-region mansions than among the bright, well-attested stations such as Al Simak immediately following it. Its virtue of benevolence and gain places it, like Al Zubrah before it, among the commercially and socially favourable manazil rather than the harsher stations assigned to discord, siege or revenge found elsewhere in the twenty-eight.