Al Zubrah

Al Zubrah is the eleventh lunar mansion, spanning roughly 128 to 141 degrees within Leo. Its name refers to the mane, the stars on the Lion's back. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mars, and its traditional talismanic virtue is voyages and trade, favourable for journeys undertaken for profit and for commercial ventures. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, used in the timing of talismans and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic literature rather than claims about the stars, which here are the group along the back of Leo that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage through the ecliptic.

Al Zubrah's name for the Lion's mane or back is identified with the stars delta and theta Leonis, and its talismanic assignment to voyages and trade for profit places it among a recognisable cluster of commercially-themed manazil scattered through the twenty-eight, alongside Al Awwa's benevolence and gain and Al Fargh al Thani's harvest and revenue near the circle's end, suggesting that medieval merchants' practical interest in favourable timing for journeys and deals shaped which virtues were preserved and elaborated in the surviving manazil literature. As with several of the fainter central-Leo stations, Western sources transliterate the name inconsistently, appearing also as Zubrah, Zobra or Al Zabrah depending on the manuscript tradition being followed.

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 Zubrah is the eleventh of them, running from 8 degrees 34 minutes of Leo to 21 degrees 26 minutes of Leo. 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 Zubrah 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.