Al Zubana

Al Zubana is the sixteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 192 to 205 degrees within Libra. Its name means the claws, for these stars were anciently reckoned the claws of the Scorpion before Libra was drawn as a separate balance. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Moon, and its traditional talismanic virtue is redemption and hindrance, the ransoming of a captive and the blocking of an enemy. 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 stars are those of Libra, once counted as the Scorpion's claws, which the twenty-eight-mansion scheme places at this station of the Moon's monthly circuit.

Al Zubana's identification of its stars, now assigned to Libra, as the Scorpion's claws preserves a genuinely older constellation figure: Libra was carved out of Scorpius as an independent sign only in the Roman period, and the manazil name, fixed earlier, still remembers the stars' original role as part of the Scorpion rather than as an independent set of balance-scales, exactly the point discussed in the Zodiac table's own entry on Libra's claws. The mansion's virtue of redemption and hindrance, ransom of the captive alongside the blocking of an enemy, again shows the Picatrix's characteristic pairing of a positive and a negative application within one station's fixed magical property.

The twenty eight mansions divide the ecliptic by the Moon rather than by the Sun, and that single choice is what makes the scheme unlike the zodiac beside it. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Zubana is the sixteenth of them, running from 12 degrees 51 minutes of Libra to 25 degrees 43 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 Zubana 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.