Al Fargh al Mukdim

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.

A mansion is a night's travel. The system exists because the Moon covers roughly one twenty eighth of the circle between one nightfall and the next. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Fargh al Mukdim is the twenty sixth of them, running from 21 degrees 26 minutes of Aquarius to 4 degrees 17 minutes of Pisces. 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 Fargh al Mukdim 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.