The 28 Lunar Mansions: Names, History and Calculation

From observed stars to named sectors

People tracked the Moon moving eastward against the stars night by night. Arabic manāzil al-qamar and their Latin reception preserved a sequence of 28 named stations. In Book II, chapter 33 of Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa names each one, associates it with a sky figure, and reports favorable or unfavorable uses. The 1651 English text is our witness for the Latinized names in the table below. Its English spellings vary, and the Arabic names in Joseph H. Peterson’s notes are identifications rather than a claim that every manuscript uses one spelling.

Agrippa says each mansion contains nearly 12°51′26″—the rounded value of one twenty-eighth of a full circle. But he also describes the stations as fixed in the eighth sphere and links names to stars such as the Pleiades and the heart of Scorpio. Those are not the same thing as an unchanging tropical degree list. Stars drift through tropical longitude over centuries because the equinox precesses. A calculator must therefore declare whether its zero point is tropical, sidereal, or tied to particular marker stars.

Our declared calculation

This site uses the Moon’s apparent geocentric tropical ecliptic longitude. Mansion 1 begins at 0° Aries. Every mansion spans exactly 360°÷28, or 12°51′25.714…″. We include the starting boundary and exclude the ending boundary. Thus 0° Aries belongs to Alnath, while exactly 12°51′25.714…″ Aries belongs to Allothaim. The calculator searches both adjacent boundary crossings to a numerical estimate rounded to a UTC second; it does not assign an entire civil day to a single station.

This is a reproducible present-day convention that keeps Agrippa’s ordering and traditional names. It is not a reconstruction of the Moon’s position amid the historical marker stars on a medieval date. A practitioner using sidereal longitudes, a different ayanamsa, individual star positions, or another manuscript’s boundaries can get another mansion near a boundary. The labels are historical categories, and the prose on supposed effects records what a source says; neither the calculated position nor the source establishes that a ritual causes a physical result.

All 28 mansions at a glance

The short topic column compresses one part of Agrippa’s reported associations for orientation. It intentionally omits operational ritual instructions and cannot stand in for reading the source chapter. Names and associations recur with variant spellings and emphases in later occult books.

Different from the Vedic nakshatras

The common Vedic panchanga reckons 27 nakshatras, with each equal portion 13°20′ of the sidereal zodiac. It has its own names, subdivisions, and ayanamsa question. Some Indian historical lists also include a twenty-eighth station; that does not make the 28 names and tropical boundaries on this page interchangeable with a modern 27-nakshatra calculator. For a Vedic reading, use the separate nakshatra reference and Vedic calculator, which state their own settings.

Questions people ask

Is the lunar mansion the Moon sign?

No. A tropical zodiac sign spans 30°. Here each mansion spans roughly 12.86°, so a sign contains parts of two or three mansions. The Moon sign answers a broader longitude question; the mansion gives a finer numbered sector under one declared convention.

Why does a mansion change during the day?

The Moon generally advances more than 12° of ecliptic longitude per day, but its angular speed varies. Consequently a mansion entry is an instant, not necessarily a midnight date. Two people using different UTC offsets can attach different local civil dates to the same crossing.

Can I use a historical election from Agrippa with these times?

Read the historical method first. His fixed-star wording and broader election conditions matter, and one 0° Aries equal-sector label alone does not reproduce a complete historical election. The calculator is a transparent orientation tool, not a reconstruction of an individual Renaissance chart.

Calculate a UTC lunar mansion and its entry times →