Lunar Mansions
Before the zodiac was divided into twelve, the Moon's own path was divided into twenty-eight — one for each night of her circuit.
Read inside a cast chart: you will find it in the Lunar Mansions panel, once a natal chart is cast.
What you get
- All 28 mansions on an equal division of 12°51′26″ each from 0° Aries
- Your natal Moon's mansion, and the mansion of every other planet
- The Moon's current mansion and her upcoming ingresses
- An electional calendar: find favourable windows by purpose — marriage, business, travel, legal matters, health, building, farming
- The corresponding Chinese lodge (二十八宿) cross-referenced for each mansion
- An optional mansion ring on the chart wheel
How it works
The Moon crosses the zodiac in about twenty-seven and a third days, so dividing her path into twenty-eight gives roughly one mansion per night. Each carries a nature — fortunate or malefic — a planetary lord, an element, and a set of traditional attributions about what it favours.
The mansions are at their most practical in electional work, choosing a moment for something deliberate. The electional calendar matches a purpose against the attributions and returns the windows that fit, rather than asking you to read twenty-eight descriptions yourself.
They matter in horary too, where the mansion of the Moon is a genuine testimony and not merely decorative.
The Arabic Manazil and the Chinese twenty-eight lodges are separate systems that divide the same sky the same number of ways. They are cross-referenced here because the correspondence is interesting, not because they are interchangeable.
Manazil al-Qamar, on the equal division.