Al Simak

Al Simak is the fourteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 167 to 180 degrees within Virgo, and it contains the brilliant star Spica, one of the brightest along the ecliptic. Its name refers to the unarmed one, distinguishing Spica from a neighbouring star. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Saturn, and its traditional talismanic virtue is love and healing, favourable for affection and for the mending of the sick. The mansion sits at the exact midpoint of the circle, closing the first half. 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 tradition; the underlying star is Spica, a first-magnitude marker used in the calendars of many ancient peoples.

Al Simak's name distinguishes Spica, al-simak al-a'zal, the unarmed simak, from Arcturus, al-simak al-ramih, the armed simak or the lancer, a paired naming convention across two different manazil-adjacent bright stars that reflects a broader Arabic habit of naming prominent stars in contrasting pairs. Spica's position closing the first half of the twenty-eight-station circle at almost exactly 180 degrees gives this mansion a structural prominence beyond its stellar brightness alone, roughly analogous to the way the Indian scheme reads its own midpoint mansions, though the two systems' midpoints do not fall at the same degree because of the twenty-eight against twenty-seven division.

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 Simak is the fourteenth of them, running from 17 degrees 09 minutes of Virgo to 0 degrees 00 minutes of Libra. 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 Simak 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.