Long before European Renaissance magicians discovered “the moon’s mansions” in the Latin Picatrix, long before the system was filtered through Agrippa and then into the Victorian occult revival — a history traced in The Arabic Astral-Magic System the Picatrix Borrowed From — the Arabic magical tradition had developed an operationally complete map of the moon’s monthly journey through the sky — twenty-eight stations, every one with a name, a ruling spirit, its materials, a day to act, and a category of work for which that moment in the lunar cycle was suited above all others. The Shams al-Ma’arif al-Kubra sets out the twenty-eight mansions one by one in its third chapter.
What the Manazil al-Qamar (Arabic Lunar Mansions) Actually Are
The Arabic term manazil al-qamar (منازل القمر) translates literally as “the moon’s mansions” or “the moon’s resting places.” The word manzil (singular) carries the sense of a stopping-place, an inn, a stage of a journey — the place where a traveler rests for the night before moving on. A single station is a lunar manzil — a manzil of the qamar, the moon, a pairing sometimes written in reverse as “qamar manzil” — and twenty-eight of them together are the manazil al qamar. The system maps the moon’s apparent path through the sky against the fixed stars, dividing the lunar month into twenty-eight segments, each corresponding to a group of stars near which the moon is positioned on a given night.
This is fundamentally an astronomical observation. The moon completes approximately one full circuit of the sky in 27.3 days (the sidereal month) or 29.5 days (the synodic month from new moon to new moon). Tracking the moon’s position against the background stars produces a series of reference points — observable star clusters and individual stars — that serve as markers for where the moon “sleeps” each night. Twenty-eight of these stations, roughly one per day of the lunar month, became standardized in the Arabic tradition.
The Shams al-Ma’arif al-Kubra describes the same circuit in plain terms: “These are the lunar mansions. The moon traverses them every month.” It adds that “the Arabs call these mansions the anwā’,” because “when the setting one falls, the rising one rises.”
The Arabic lunar mansion system has a direct ancestor in the Indian nakshatra system — a closely parallel 27- or 28-station map of the moon’s path that appears in Sanskrit astronomical and astrological texts from at least the 1st millennium BCE. The relationship between the two systems is not coincidence: it is the result of the 8th–10th century CE Indian-Arabic translation movement. Indian astronomical texts, including the Sindhind (an Arabic rendering of Brahmagupta’s Brahmasphutasiddhanta) and related works, brought the nakshatra system into Arabic scholarly culture, where it was mapped onto the existing Arabic tradition of star-lore and fused with the planetary magic tradition inherited from Hellenistic sources.
The result was something neither purely Indian nor purely Hellenistic but genuinely syncretic: a system that combined Indian stellar tracking with Babylonian-Greek planetary theory and Arabic divine-name magic into a single integrated framework for understanding the right time to act.
The 28 Lunar Mansions in Arabic Tradition: A Brief Map
The twenty-eight mansions are distributed across the twelve signs of the zodiac — the zodiac signs in Arabic, al-burūj — with each sign containing roughly 2–3 mansions. Their Arabic names are primarily drawn from the physical star clusters or individual stars near which the moon rests — al-Thurayya (the Pleiades), al-Dabaraan (Aldebaran), al-Haq’a (a group in Orion), and so on through the full circuit of the sky.
Mansions 1–7 (Aries to Taurus): The opening stations of the lunar month, associated in the magical tradition with beginnings, new ventures, the unlocking of things that have been sealed. The first mansion, al-Sharatan (two stars in Aries, near which the moon rises at the start of the lunar cycle), is traditionally associated with the opening of operations that have long been blocked.
Mansions 8–14 (Gemini to Virgo): The middle stations, corresponding to the first and second quarters of the moon. In the Arabic magical tradition, these mansions govern communication, travel, commercial affairs, and the operations of attraction and love (jalb and tahbib).
Mansions 15–21 (Libra to Scorpio): The stations of the full moon and its decline. Mansion 15, al-Ghafr, falls near the full moon — the period of maximum lunar power in the magical tradition — and operations requiring the greatest intensity of force are keyed to these stations. Separation, binding, and coercion operations tend to be assigned to the declining moon of this phase.
Mansions 22–28 (Sagittarius to Pisces): The final stations of the lunar month, approaching the dark moon. In the Arabic magical tradition, these mansions govern the ending of things: the dissolution of hostile workings, the release of bindings, the preparation of conditions for the new beginning that the next new moon will bring. The final mansion, al-Batn al-Hut (in Pisces), is traditionally associated with completion and the threshold between cycles.
This schema is simplified — individual manuscripts vary considerably in their mansion attributions, and the operational specifics for each mansion differ across texts. What remains consistent across the tradition is the underlying logic: the moon’s position among the fixed stars creates a temporal texture, a quality of time, that is different for each of the twenty-eight stations. A closely related timing system — organized by planetary hours rather than lunar mansions — governs the summoning of the seven jinn kings.
Arabic Lunar Mansions Chart: All 28 Manazil al-Qamar
An Arabic lunar mansions (manazil al qamar) chart puts the whole circuit in one place. The fullest Arabic lunar mansions manuscript source in our translations is the Shams al-Ma’arif al-Kubra. Its second chapter, “On Breaking and Expansion and the Ordering of Works According to Times and Hours,” walks through all twenty-eight mansions in order, giving each one a letter of the Arabic alphabet — the letters are twenty-eight, the text explains, “according to the number of the twenty-eight mansions” — and a short judgment on the kind of work the moon favors while it rests there. The chart below summarizes those entries.
| # | Mansion (manzil) | Arabic | Letter | Judgment in the Shams al-Ma’arif |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | al-Sharatayn | الشرطين | ا alif | Planet Mars; “its servant is the Red One”; a letter of powerful actions |
| 2 | al-Butayn | البطين | ب bāʾ | Suited to anger; medicine is drunk; kings are stirred |
| 3 | al-Thurayya | الثريا | ج jīm | Moderate fortune; good for travel and for approaching the great |
| 4 | al-Dabaran | الدبران | د dāl | A base spirituality; harmful works |
| 5 | al-Haq’ah | الهقعة | ه hāʾ | Mixed, of moderate heat; good works and their contraries |
| 6 | al-Han’ah | الهنعة | و wāw | Fortunate; affection, and bringing together the distant |
| 7 | al-Dhira’ | الذراع | ز zāy | Righteous; treatments, retreats, all works |
| 8 | al-Nathrah | النثرة | ح ḥāʾ | “Not appointed for good” |
| 9 | al-Tarfah | الطرفة | ط ṭāʾ | Base, “like the preceding one” |
| 10 | al-Jabhah | الجبهة | ي yāʾ | Mixed between good and evil |
| 11 | al-Zubrah | الزبرة | ك kāf | Righteous; growth of provisions, seeking needs |
| 12 | al-Sarfah | الصرفة | ل lām | Mixed for good and evil |
| 13 | al-’Awwa’ | العواء | م mīm | Mixed; nothing set in motion “except riding the sea” |
| 14 | al-Simak | السماك | ن nūn | “Do absolutely nothing in it” |
| 15 | al-Ghafr | الغفر | س sīn | Righteous; “work in it whatever you wish” |
| 16 | al-Zubana | الزبانا | ع ʿayn | Mixed; nothing set in motion except good |
| 17 | al-Iklil | الإكليل | ف fāʾ | Not appointed to good; sound worldly matters prosper |
| 18 | al-Qalb | القلب | ص ṣād | Assists acts of good |
| 19 | al-Shawla | الشولة | ق qāf | Gladdening, but set no worldly work in motion |
| 20 | al-Na’a’im | النعائم | ر rāʾ | Pure; “purifies hearts, gladdens the soul” |
| 21 | al-Balda | البلدة | ش shīn | Gladdening; neither benefit nor harm in worldly movement |
| 22 | Sa’d al-Dhabih | سعد الذابح | ت tāʾ | Gladdening; not suited to worldly affairs |
| 23 | Sa’d Bula’ | سعد بلع | ث thāʾ | Balanced; all works of good |
| 24 | Sa’d al-Su’ud | سعد السعود | خ khāʾ | Fortunate; all acts of good |
| 25 | Sa’d al-Akhbiyah | سعد الأخبية | ذ dhāl | Fortunate; all acts of good |
| 26 | al-Fargh al-Muqaddam | الفرغ المقدم | ض ḍād | Fortunate; “do in it whatever you wish” |
| 27 | al-Fargh al-Mu’akhkhar | الفرغ المؤخر | ظ ẓāʾ | Gladdening; benefits in fears |
| 28 | al-Risha’ | الرشاء | غ ghayn | Wholesome; seeking the sciences; supplication answered |
The Shams also explains why the letters and the mansions share one number: fourteen mansions are “manifest above the earth and fourteen are below the earth. When one mansion sets, the fifteenth, its counterpart, rises.” For readers who want a manazil al qamar diagram rather than a table, its third chapter, “On the Judgments of the Twenty-Eight Mansions of the Moon and the Celestial Spheres,” supplies one — a “circular form of the lunar mansions” — together with a table of the lunar mansions, the zodiacal signs, and the Roman months, and a worked example for finding the moon’s station: if the crescent first appeared in al-Sharatayn and seven days of the Arab month have passed, “we count seven mansions from al-Sharatayn, and we come to al-Dhira’.”
As the chart shows, the Shams does not always agree with the simplified scheme sketched above — al-Nathrah, for instance, is judged there as “not appointed for good” — which is exactly the variation between manuscripts noted above. For mansions of the moon talismans, the Shams ties the writing to the station itself: in one operation the letters are to be written on a gold ring “while the moon is in the mansion of the letter.” How the Shams turns these judgments into working time is the subject of our companion essay, Shams al-Ma’arif lunar mansions: the secret timing system of Arabic magic.
Timing in the Tumtum al-Hindi
The Tumtum al-Hindi does not contain a systematic exposition of the lunar mansion system — it is an operational handbook, not an astronomical treatise.
The most obvious timing element is the day-of-the-week specification that appears in many chapters. The text repeatedly specifies that particular operations must be performed on the night of Friday, or on Wednesday, or on a particular day with a particular incense:
“This is a chapter on attraction by fire recited on the day of Wednesday (yawm al-Arbi’a’) with incense (bukhur)… Burn it at the hour of Mercury (‘Utarid), for Wednesday is the day of Mercury.”
— p. 66
The planetary week (each day ruled by one of the seven planets) is one layer of the timing system.
Where the Tumtum al-Hindi Names the Stations of the Moon
The phrase manazil al-qamar itself appears in the Tumtum al-Hindi in a short operation near the end of the book, the “Chapter on Healing and the Stations of the Moon” (p. 293): “This is a chapter for healing and the stations of the moon (manazil al-qamar). Write it and it shall descend.” One copy is placed upon the sick person in bed; the second is dissolved in rose water for washing. Elsewhere the text states its lunar condition as a phase rather than a station: a 7×7 magic square for love and acceptance is to be written on parchment “during the planetary hour of Venus (al-Zuhra) when the moon is waxing” (p. 36) — the square size the tradition assigns to Venus, explored in The Venus Magic Square.
The Indian Connection: Nakshatras and the Arabic Mansions
The Sanskrit nakshatra system tracks the moon’s position against a set of 27 or 28 star groups (the number varies between different Indian astronomical traditions). Each nakshatra has a ruling deity (devata), an associated quality (guna), and specific activities that are auspicious or inauspicious when the moon occupies that station. The Jyotisha (Indian astrology) tradition has used this system for timing ritual activity — when to begin a journey, conduct a marriage, start a business, or perform a specific rite — for at least 2,500 years.
When Indian astronomical texts entered the Arabic tradition through the translation movement, the nakshatra system was mapped onto the Arabic star-naming tradition and fused with the Arabic planetary magic framework. The resulting manazil system retained the Indian insight that the moon’s position among fixed stars creates meaningful temporal distinctions — that the 15th night of the lunar month is qualitatively different from the 3rd night — while expressing that insight through Arabic divine names, Quranic verses, and Islamic cosmological categories rather than Sanskrit devatas and Vedic ritual categories.
The Tumtum al-Hindi’s attributed author is an Indian sage. Its religious framework is Islamic. Its magical ingredients mix Indian material culture (pepper, nalij wood, safflower) with the broader Arabic and Islamicate pharmacy.
How the Manazil Survived into the Latin Picatrix — and Got Simplified
The Arabic lunar mansion system entered European Renaissance magic primarily through the Ghayat al-Hakim — the “Goal of the Sage,” known in its Latin translation as the Picatrix. This 11th-century Arabic compilation, one of the most ambitious magical encyclopedias ever written, contains an extended treatment of the twenty-eight mansions and their talismanic uses. When the Picatrix was translated into Latin in 13th-century Spain (Castile, under Alfonso X), the mansion system traveled with it into the European tradition.
But the Latin transmission simplified and in some cases distorted the system. The nuanced Arabic understanding of how mansions interact with planetary hours, how the quality of each mansion shifts across the lunar month as a whole, and how specific spirits are associated with specific mansions — this complexity was reduced to a series of correspondences that European readers could apply more mechanically. By the time the system reached Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531), and then the 20th-century occult revival through sources like the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin and later Aleister Crowley’s treatments, it had been flattened considerably.
The Map Before the Simplification
The twenty-eight mansions traveled from India to Baghdad to Cordoba to Florence — and at each stage of transmission, something was lost. The Latin Picatrix flattened the invocatory material. Agrippa reduced the mansions to a correspondence table. The twentieth-century occult revival inherited the table without the system. What most Western practitioners now work with is a simplified index stripped of the temporal logic, the spiritual hierarchies, and the operational specificity that made the original framework function as a living map of when to act.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 28 lunar mansions in Arabic magic?
The 28 lunar mansions (manazil al-qamar) are stations along the moon’s monthly path through the sky, each corresponding to a fixed star cluster. In Arabic magic, every mansion carries a ruling spirit, a talisman design, an incense, and a category of work — forming a complete timing system for ritual operations.
What is the connection between Arabic manazil and Indian nakshatras?
The Arabic manazil al-qamar descend directly from the Indian nakshatra system — a parallel 27- or 28-station lunar map used in Jyotisha astrology for at least 2,500 years. Indian texts entered Arabic culture through the 8th–10th century translation movement.
Where can I read the Tumtum al-Hindi in English?
The first complete English translation of the Tumtum al-Hindi is published by John Friend Publishing. The facing-page bilingual edition runs 298 pages with all fifteen talismanic figures reproduced from the manuscript, available on Amazon in Kindle, hardcover, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited.
What are the characteristics and historical references of the twenty-eight lunar mansions?
Each of the twenty-eight lunar mansions is named for the star or star group the moon rests near, such as al-Thurayya (the Pleiades) and al-Dabaran (Aldebaran). In the Shams al-Ma’arif, each mansion also carries a letter of the Arabic alphabet and a judgment on the work it favors, from favorable stations like al-Ghafr to stations in which nothing should be begun, like al-Simak. Historically, the system parallels the Indian nakshatras, entered Arabic learning through the translation movement, and reached Europe through the Latin Picatrix.
Is there an Arabic lunar mansions chart or manazil al qamar diagram in the manuscripts?
Yes. The third chapter of the Shams al-Ma’arif al-Kubra includes a circular diagram of the lunar mansions and a table matching the mansions to the zodiacal signs and the Roman months. The chart on this page lists all 28 mansions with the letter and judgment the Shams gives each one.
What does qamar manzil or lunar manzil mean?
Manzil means a stopping-place, the inn where a traveler rests for the night, and qamar means the moon. A lunar manzil is one of the 28 stations the moon visits in a month; together they are the manazil al-qamar, the Arabic lunar mansions.
Does the Tumtum al-Hindi list all 28 lunar mansions?
No. The Tumtum al-Hindi is an operational handbook rather than an astronomical treatise. It names the lunar stations in a healing chapter (p. 293) and times other workings by planetary day, planetary hour, and the waxing moon; for a complete list of the mansions, see the chart above, drawn from the Shams al-Ma’arif.
Tumtum al-Hindi: The Book of Tumtum the Indian — the first complete English translation. Facing-page bilingual edition, 298 pages, with all fifteen talismanic figures reproduced from the manuscript. Available on Amazon in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback. Available on Kindle Unlimited.
Further Reading
The lunar mansion system connects to a broader Arabic magical corpus available in English from John Friend Publishing:
- Shams al-Anwar — the “Sun of Lights,” which contains systematic treatment of planetary and stellar magic.
- Kitab al-Ajnas: Solomonic Grimoire of Asif ibn Barkhiya — the Solomonic text.
- Sihr Muluk al-Jann — “The Magic of the Kings of the Jinn,” which covers the planetary-spirit framework.
- Mujarrabat al-Ruhban — a collection of proved operations.
For the scholarly background on the lunar mansion system and its transmission between Indian and Arabic traditions, the Wikipedia article on Lunar mansion covers the comparative systems across cultures. The article on Nakshatra covers the Indian antecedent system from which the Arabic manazil tradition is partly derived.
