Al Haqa

Al Haqa is the fifth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 51 to 64 degrees within Taurus and Gemini, in the region of the stars at the head of Orion. Its name refers to a white spot, an asterism of faint stars there. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is return and health, favourable for homecomings, recovery, and the mending of what was lost. The twenty-eight mansions each carry such a fixed magical property from the Arabic manazil tradition, used in the timing of images and talismans and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition; the underlying stars are the modest group near Orion's head that the manazil scheme counts at this station.

Al Haqa's name, referring to a faint white mark, is glossed in some medieval Arabic star-lists as al-haq'ah, the whiteness or the mark on a horse's forehead, an image reused from ordinary Bedouin descriptive vocabulary for horses and camels rather than drawn from any distinct mythological figure, which is typical of several of the fainter manazil whose names describe the visual impression of a star group rather than narrate a story about it. The mansion's position near the head of Orion places it close to the boundary the Indian scheme reckons as the end of Mrigashira, a further instance of the rough correspondence, though never exact agreement, between manazil and nakshatra boundaries as the Moon's circuit is cut by twenty-eight against twenty-seven divisions.

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 Haqa is the fifth of them, running from 21 degrees 26 minutes of Taurus to 4 degrees 17 minutes of Gemini. 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 Haqa 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.