Al Nathrah

Al Nathrah is the eighth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 90 to 102 degrees within Cancer, in the region of the faint cluster Praesepe, the Manger. Its name refers to that nebulous patch and the two flanking stars called the Asses. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Sun, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and imprisonment, a mansion the tradition used both to bind affection and to hold a thing fast. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic literature rather than claims about the stars, which here are the modest cluster in Cancer that later Western astronomy also knew as the Beehive.

Al Nathrah's name for the nebulous patch of Praesepe and its two flanking stars, called the Aselli or Asses in the Greco-Roman tradition that used the same cluster as a weather sign, shows the same patch of sky read through at least three independent naming traditions, Arabic manzil, Greco-Roman folk astronomy, and the Indian nakshatra Pushya, each assigning it a different name and a different symbolic reading without any one derived from the others. The Picatrix's assignment of love and imprisonment together to this mansion, binding used for both affection and confinement, reflects a broader pattern in the talismanic literature where a single mansion's virtue often yokes a benevolent and a coercive application under one heading rather than treating them as opposites.

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 Nathrah is the eighth of them, running from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Cancer to 12 degrees 51 minutes of Cancer. 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 Nathrah 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.