Al Fargh al Mukdim, the Forward Spout

Al Fargh al Mukdim is the twenty-sixth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 321 to 334 degrees within Aquarius and Pisces. Its name means the first or forward spout, one of a pair of mansions imagined as the mouth of a water-bucket, formed by stars in the Great Square of Pegasus. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is union and health, favourable for joining and for well-being. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa for the timing of talismans. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than statements about the stars, which here are two corners of the Square of Pegasus that the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station.

Al Fargh al Mukdim's identifying stars, alpha Andromedae and beta Pegasi, form two corners of the Great Square of Pegasus, a large and easily recognised asterism shared across Arabic, Greek and later Western sky-lore alike, though each tradition reads the same four-star square through a different figure, spout of a water-bucket here, wing or side of the winged horse in the Greek Pegasus myth, and part of the chained princess Andromeda in yet another adjacent Greek figure. The bucket-mouth image shared between this mansion and its immediate successor, Al Fargh al Thani, is one of the clearest cases in the whole manazil scheme of a single well-known asterism being deliberately split across two consecutive twenty-eight-fold stations rather than confined to one.