A medieval Arabic text attributed to the Prophet Daniel — sealed with divine invocations, structured around the twelve zodiac signs, and credited to one of the greatest astrologers of the Islamic world — contains a complete system for reading natural disasters from the heavens. Earthquakes, droughts, wars, plagues: the manuscript assigns each catastrophe its celestial signature, mapped against the zodiacal sign in which the omen occurs. The text has circulated in Arabic manuscript tradition for a thousand years. It has never been translated into English — until now.

That makes Kitab Danyal al-Nabi an Arabic astrology manuscript on the zodiac that an English reader can now read from cover to cover. What follows walks through what this Arabic zodiac manuscript actually contains: its table of contents, the passages where the earthquakes appear, the twelve signs under their Arabic names, the lands each sign was said to rule, and the lunar mansions that run alongside them.

What Kitab Danyal al-Nabi Actually Is

The full title tells you what you are dealing with: Kitāb Dāniyāl al-Nabī — “The Book of the Prophet Daniel.” The attribution to Daniel, the biblical and Quranic prophet of visions and dream-interpretation, is a deliberate choice. It places the text within a long tradition of prophetic prognostication — the idea that certain figures, by virtue of their proximity to the divine, could read the future in natural phenomena.

The actual compiler, according to this edition’s title page, is Abū Maʿshar al-Falakī al-Kabīr — “Abū Maʿshar, the Great Philosopher of the Celestial Sphere.” This attribution points to one of the most consequential figures in the history of world astrology. The historical Abū Maʿshar (c. 787–886 CE, also known in the Latin West as Albumasar) was a Persian astrologer based in Baghdad whose Introductorium Maius became the single most important vehicle for transmitting Arabic astrological theory into medieval Europe. Latin versions of his works appeared in the twelfth century and shaped European astrology for the next four hundred years.

Whether the Kitab Danyal in its current form was composed by the historical Abū Maʿshar, or composed in his name by later scholars working in his tradition, is a question that manuscript attribution studies have not definitively resolved — a common situation in the Arabic occult literature, where prestigious names attracted texts the way rivers attract tributaries. What the text contains, regardless of its authorship, is a sophisticated operational system rooted in the genuine methods of classical Islamic folk-astronomy.

Inside the Arabic Zodiac Manuscript: What the Book Contains

The English edition follows the manuscript’s own order. Its contents page lists six divisions:

  • The Book of the Prophet Daniel (Kitāb Dāniyāl al-Nabī) — p. 5
  • Discourse on the Days of the Month (al-Qawl ʿalā al-Ayyām) — p. 10
  • Guide to the Mansions of the Moon (Dalīl Manāzil al-Qamar) — p. 11
  • Part One: The Zodiac Signs and Their Nativities (al-Burūj wa-Mawālīduhā) — p. 18
  • Part Two: Prognostications by the Day of Entry (Aḥkām al-Dukhūl) — p. 44
  • Part Three: Medical Remedies and Beneficial Herbs (al-Mujarrabāt al-Ṭibbiyya) — p. 63

Part One is astrology for the individual. Sign by sign, it describes the person born under each of the twelve zodiac signs and gives the sign’s ruling planet and its month — Leo, for instance, is headed “Sign of Leo, and Its Ruler Is the Sun. Its Month Is Tammūz.” Part Two is astrology for the world: the year, the weather, the harvest, war and disease. It is in Part Two that the earthquakes appear. For the Arabic Book of Daniel as a prophetic text more broadly, see the Arabic Book of Daniel and its zodiac prophecy.

The Operational Logic: If X Happens in Y Sign, Z Follows

The genre to which Kitab Danyal al-Nabi belongs has a technical name in Arabic scholarship: ahkam al-nujum — “judgments of the stars,” sometimes translated as judicial astrology, sometimes as natural prognostication. The genre is distinct from natal horoscopy (casting charts for individuals at birth) and from electional astrology (choosing auspicious moments for actions). Its concern is collective: what do celestial events portend for harvests, rulers, cities, and peoples?

The operational logic is consistent across the tradition and stated with mechanical precision: if a particular celestial event — a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse, a thunder-clap, an earthquake — occurs while the Sun or Moon occupies a specific zodiacal sign, the consequences for the region or domain associated with that sign can be read. Different signs govern different directions, different peoples, different crops, different kinds of weather.

This is not metaphor. Medieval Arabic practitioners treated these as empirically testable correlations, established by observation across generations and recorded in texts exactly like Kitab Danyal al-Nabi for others to use. The text’s subtitle in this edition reads: “A Treatise of Prognostication” — kitab in the sense of a working handbook, not merely a theoretical treatise.

Where the Earthquakes Appear: Year Signs and Sky Omens

The earthquake readings come in two forms. The first is the year reading. A run of sections headed “If the Year Was Born in” a given sign — Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn among them — forecasts the character of a year that begins under that sign.

Two of them name the earthquake outright. If the year was born in Cancer, “the land will be shaken by earthquake,” alongside severe warfare, a dark south wind, lean harvests and sickness in Syria and Egypt. In a year born in Libra, “the anger and the earthquake will be severe”: travel is perilous, and the deaths are many.

The second form is a series of short “Statements” (al-Qawl ʿalā) on sky omens: meteors (al-Shihāb), the eclipse of the Moon (Kusūf al-Qamar), the rainbow (Qaws al-Quzaḥ), thunder (al-Raʿd), lightning (al-Barq), and “Earthquakes and Thunderbolts” (al-Rajfa wa-l-Ṣawāʿiq). These are keyed largely to the months of the Syrian calendar rather than to the signs — the earthquake statement, for instance, runs from Tishrīn al-Awwal (October) onward. Together they show what reading earthquakes by zodiac sign looked like on the page: a forecast for the year drawn from the sign in which it began, alongside separate omens for each month.

The Solar Ingress: Reading the Year by Zodiac Entry

One of the most practically significant sections of Kitab Danyal al-Nabi tracks the precise moment when the Sun enters each of the twelve zodiacal signs — the dukhūl al-shams fī al-burj, the “entry of the Sun into the sign.” This moment, in classical Arabic astronomical practice, was the foundation for annual prognostications. The state of the heavens at the instant of solar ingress was read as a signature for the entire period the Sun would occupy that sign — roughly one month.

The manuscript records these ingresses with notable precision, noting not just the month but the hour of entry:

Ādhār (March): On the 21st of the month, the Sun enters the sign of Aries (al-Ḥamal), and the Moon is located at the ninth hour of the night.

Nīsān (April): On the 21st of the month, the Sun enters the sign of Taurus (al-Thawr), at the ninth hour of the night. And the Moon is located at the first hour of the night.

Ayyār (May): On the 22nd of the month, the Sun enters the sign of Gemini (al-Jawzāʾ), and it is located at the fifth hour of the daytime.

Ḥazīrān (June): On the 21st or 22nd of the month, the Sun enters the sign of Cancer (al-Saraṭān), and it is located at the ninth hour of the daytime.

(p. 15)

What is striking about this passage is how precisely it tracks what modern astronomy would recognize as accurate: the Sun does indeed enter Aries on or around March 21 (the vernal equinox), Cancer on or around June 21 (the summer solstice). The manuscript is not simply mythologizing. It is recording actual astronomical observation in a framework that then uses those observations as the basis for prognostication.

The Arabic month names used here — Ādhār, Nīsān, Ayyār, Ḥazīrān — are the Aramaic-origin months of the Syrian calendar, still in use across the Levant and reflecting the deep antiquity of the region’s astronomical traditions. The text is operating across multiple calendrical systems simultaneously, integrating Babylonian, Persian, and Islamic elements into a working synthesis.

The Twelve Signs by Their Arabic Names, and the Lands They Rule

The manuscript names all twelve signs in Arabic in a single line: Aries (al-Ḥamal), Taurus (al-Thawr), Gemini (al-Jawzāʾ), Cancer (al-Saraṭān), Leo (al-Asad), Virgo (al-Sunbula), Libra (al-Mīzān), Scorpio (al-ʿAqrab), Sagittarius (al-Qaws), Capricorn (al-Jady), Aquarius (al-Dalw) and Pisces (al-Ḥūt). For what Daniel’s text says about the person born under each one, see the guide to the zodiac signs in Arabic.

What makes this a working Arabic astrology manuscript rather than a list of names is the next step. Under the heading “Dominion of the Planets” (Tadbīr al-Kawākib), the signs are assigned to countries: Taurus rules Babylon, Pisces rules the Levant (al-Shām), Leo rules Asia, Sagittarius rules Cilicia and Capricorn rules Syria, while Jupiter rules the lands of Persia. Alongside it the text sets out the planetary enmities: the Sun is the enemy of Saturn, Venus of Mars, Mercury of Jupiter, and the Moon of Saturn and Mars. This is the link the prognostications depend on — an omen in a sign becomes news for the land that sign governs.

The Abjad Numerical System: The Hidden Calculator

Woven through Kitab Danyal al-Nabi — as through virtually all texts in the Islamic occult tradition — is the abjad system: the assignment of numerical values to Arabic letters. The manuscript presents the complete table in its opening pages:

The Abjad Letters (al-Aḥruf al-Abjadiyya)

Alif = 1, Bāʾ = 2, Jīm = 3, Dāl = 4, Hāʾ = 5, Wāw = 6, Zāy = 7, Ḥāʾ = 8, Ṭāʾ = 9, Yāʾ = 10, Kāf = 20, Lām = 30 … Ghayn = 1000.

(p. 5)

This is not decorative. The abjad system is the computational infrastructure of the entire tradition. Divine names, Quranic verses, the names of zodiacal signs and planetary rulers — all are reducible to numerical values, which can then be manipulated, combined, and compared. The numerical value of a zodiacal sign’s name determines its resonance with specific planetary forces. The value of the day of the week determines which hour of that day is most propitious for a given operation.

In the context of earthquake and weather prognostication specifically, the abjad system was used to calculate the “strength” of an omen: a celestial event occurring when the value of the sign’s name corresponded harmonically with the value of the divine name governing that domain was understood as a more powerful and reliable indicator than one occurring in disharmonious numerical conditions. This is the hidden mathematics of medieval Arabic astrology — not superstition but a coherent, if unverifiable, computational method.

The Broader Tradition: From Babylon to Baghdad to Bologna

Kitab Danyal al-Nabi does not exist in isolation. It is a node in a network of celestial-prognostication texts stretching from ancient Babylon through the great translation movement of the 8th–10th centuries CE, in which Greek and Persian astronomical and astrological works were systematically rendered into Arabic under Abbasid patronage.

The tradition of reading earthquakes, droughts, and wars from celestial events is documented in Babylonian omen series — the Enuma Anu Enlil, a collection of seventy tablets of celestial omens assembled over centuries, is the foundational document. The Greeks systematized this material. The Arabs inherited it from both channels, added the abjad computational framework, the lunar mansion system (manāzil al-qamar, which occupies its own dedicated section in Kitab Danyal al-Nabi), and integrated everything into an Islamic theological framing in which celestial events were understood as signs (āyāt) of God’s will rather than the actions of planetary deities.

This synthesis is what the Western Renaissance ultimately inherited — largely without acknowledging where it came from. When Latin translators working in twelfth-century Toledo, Palermo, and Salerno rendered Abū Maʿshar’s Introductorium and dozens of associated texts into Latin, they brought with them not just astronomical data but the entire framework of celestial prognostication that underlies medieval European natural philosophy, medicine, and political theory. The idea that earthquakes could be predicted from planetary configurations — which appears in everything from Roger Bacon to Paracelsus — is, at its roots, Arabic.

The Wikipedia articles on Abū Maʿshar and judicial astrology provide useful entry points into the scholarship on this transmission.

For how this material fed the wider body of medieval Arabic astrology manuscripts and star magic, see the medieval Arab stellar magic the Picatrix borrowed from.

The Lunar Mansions: A Parallel System

Running alongside the zodiacal system in Kitab Danyal al-Nabi is the lunar mansion system — the manāzil al-qamar, or “the Moon’s mansions.” The manuscript dedicates a full section to this, described in the Table of Contents as: Dalīl Manāzil al-Qamar wa-Huwa Mawḍūʿ ʿĀmm wa-Mujarrab min al-Falāsifa wa-l-ʿUlamāʾ — “Guide to the Mansions of the Moon — A General Subject, Tested by Philosophers and Scholars.”

The phrase mujarrab — “tested,” “proven by experience” — is significant. It appears repeatedly in the Arabic occult manuscript tradition to mark material that is not merely theoretical but empirically attested. The lunar mansion system divides the Moon’s monthly path through the sky into 28 stations, and every station carries a prognostic and operative character. In the context of earthquake prediction, the Moon’s mansion at the time of the event was as significant as the zodiacal sign — the two systems were used in conjunction, each refining the reading of the other.

The two systems meet again in Part Two, where a short table headed “The Zodiac Signs and Their Mansions” (al-Abrāj wa-Manāziluhā) pairs signs with mansions directly.

For a full treatment of the 28-mansion system and its operative applications, see The 28 Lunar Mansions in Arabic Magic. The mansion system has deep roots in Indian, Persian, and Arabian astronomical traditions predating Islam, and its inclusion in a text attributed to the Prophet Daniel reflects the syncretic intellectual culture of the medieval Islamic world, where Greek, Babylonian, Persian, and Indian astronomical knowledge had been integrated into a single operational framework by scholars working across a century of intensive translation.

What the Text Covers: The Full Scope

The breadth of Kitab Danyal al-Nabi is itself informative about what medieval Arabic folk-astronomy considered related problems. The text treats, according to its own subtitle: “the Zodiac Signs and Magic, the Benefits of Medicinal Herbs, Precious Stones, the Tablet of Life, Death, the Treatment of Diseases, Warfare, and Other Matters.”

This is not eclecticism — it is systematic coherence. In the classical Arabic worldview, celestial configurations did not merely predict events; they governed the properties of things. The herb that was most effective for a given disease was the herb governed by the planet that also governed that disease. The stone whose virtues were activated by a particular zodiacal alignment was the stone appropriate for a talisman made to operate under that alignment. Earthquake prognostication, herbal medicine, talismanic magic, and disease treatment are not different subjects in this framework — they are different applications of a single theory of celestial influence on terrestrial matter.

The manuscript’s third section on medical remedies — al-Mujarrabāt al-Ṭibbiyya, “Tested Medical Remedies” — is thus not a digression from its astrological content. It is the same system applied to the human body rather than to the earth.

A Thousand Years of Predicting Earthquakes by the Stars

A manuscript that assigns each zodiacal sign its earthquake signature, calculates the omen’s strength through the abjad values of divine names, cross-references the Moon’s mansion against the Sun’s position, and integrates all of this into a medical-astrological-talismanic framework that treats earthquake prediction and herbal medicine as applications of the same theory — this is not a curiosity. It is a complete intellectual system, transmitted and used across a millennium, from the Abbasid translation movement through the medieval Levant and into the Arabic manuscript collections that preserved it until the present day.

What Kitab Danyal al-Nabi demonstrates is not whether zodiacal earthquake prediction works. It demonstrates what a coherent, computational, empirically self-confident approach to celestial prognostication looked like when the Arabic-Islamic world was the center of global science — and that the system was considered important enough to copy, transmit, and attribute to a prophet.

For the zodiac-by-zodiac character readings from the same manuscript, see an Arabic horoscope for each sign. The manuscript is now available in English for the first time.

The Book of the Prophet Daniel (Kitāb Dāniyāl al-Nabī) — Kindle, hardcover, and paperback.

The Kindle edition is included free with Kindle Unlimited — page-reads also support the press.

The edition reproduces talismanic seals and illustrations from the source manuscript. Arabic terms are transliterated according to IJMES scholarly standards with full diacritical marks.

Formats and details of the edition are on the Kitab Daniel book page.

Further reading: For the Solomonic magical tradition that runs parallel to the celestial-prognostication framework of Kitab Danyal, the essential companion texts are Shams al-Anwar — the 14th-century Arabic grimoire in the al-Buni lineage (read more about its magic-square system) — available from John Friend Publishing as Suns of Lights & Treasures of Secrets, and the Solomonic formulary Mujarrabat al-Ruhban — practical tested operations in the same Arabic manuscript tradition — available as Mujarrabat al-Ruhban.