Al Ghafr, the Covering

Al Ghafr is the fifteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 180 to 192 degrees within Virgo and Libra. Its name means the covering or the veil, an asterism of faint stars. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Sun, and its traditional talismanic virtue is discord and treasure, an unusual pairing the tradition assigned to both the sowing of strife and the finding of hidden wealth. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic literature, used in 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 claims about the stars, which here are the faint group along the Virgo-Libra border that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Al Ghafr's name, the covering or the veil, describes an asterism of faint stars in Virgo whose exact identification varies somewhat between medieval Arabic sources, another of the manazil, like Al Haqa and Al Hana, named for visual impression rather than myth. Its paired virtue of discord and treasure, strife and hidden wealth bound together in a single mansion, is one of several instances in the series where the Picatrix tradition assigns what look to modern readers like contradictory properties to one station, a pattern the medieval magical literature treats as entirely ordinary, since a single mansion's rulership was understood to cover more than one possible working rather than a single fixed meaning.