Al Sarfah

Al Sarfah is the twelfth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 141 to 154 degrees within Leo and Virgo. Its name means the changer or turner, said to mark the turn of the season and the weather, and it is identified with the bright star Denebola at the Lion's tail. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is harvest and commerce, favourable for reaping and for trade. 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; the underlying star is Denebola, which the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit through the ecliptic.

Al Sarfah's identification with Denebola and its name, the changer or the turner, both point to the same underlying observation, that the star's rising or setting coincided in the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar with a turn in the season and the weather, tying this specific mansion directly to the practical anwa' tradition of star-based weather forecasting rather than only to the talismanic magic recorded by the Picatrix and Agrippa. The pairing of harvest and commerce as its magical virtue is consistent with that seasonal-turn naming, since a star marking the shift toward autumn would naturally accumulate associations with the agricultural and mercantile activity that followed the turn in the weather.

Where the zodiac cuts the ecliptic into twelve, the manazil cut it into twenty eight, and the number comes from the Moon's daily motion rather than from any figure in the sky. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Sarfah is the twelfth of them, running from 21 degrees 26 minutes of Leo to 4 degrees 17 minutes of Virgo. 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 Sarfah 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.