How to Find the Moon's Mansion Today

I keep a small ritual before I elect anything by the Moon. I find where she is to the degree, and I ask which of her twenty-eight lodgings she is sleeping in tonight. The mansion tells me what the day is good for and what it is not, and the whole question turns on one number: the Moon’s longitude, and which twenty-eighth of the circle it falls in.

What is the Moon’s mansion?

The Moon’s mansion is one of twenty-eight equal stations she moves through as she circles the zodiac, each spanning 12°51′26″, measured tropically from 0° Aries. She lodges in one for a little under a day. The system is the Arabic al-manazil, carried into Western practice through the Picatrix and Agrippa. The 28 mansions guide sets out the full tradition; this page is the practical one.

How do you find the Moon’s mansion today?

Take the Moon’s tropical longitude and divide it by 12°51′26″. The whole number of the result, counted from one, is the mansion. A Moon at 47°09′ divides to three and a remainder, so she is in the fourth mansion, Al-Dabaran, the Eye of the Bull. You can do the arithmetic by hand, or read it straight off a tracker that runs her position live.

The Lunar Punk mansion tracker computes the Moon’s longitude off Swiss Ephemeris, names the mansion she is in, and gives the time she crosses into the next one. It is the fastest way to answer the question, and it saves you the boundary arithmetic that is easy to fumble near a cusp.

How long does the Moon stay in a mansion?

A little under a day. The Moon covers roughly 13°11′ of the zodiac every twenty-four hours, and a mansion is only 12°51′26″ wide, so she clears one about every twenty-three hours and moves through all twenty-eight in a sidereal month of about 27.3 days. Her speed varies, faster at perigee and slower at apogee, so the exact hour of each ingress is worth reading from the ephemeris rather than assuming.

What do you do once you know it?

You read the mansion’s nature and time your work to it. Each of the twenty-eight carries a traditional list of what it favours and what it spoils: a mansion good for journeys and medicine, another for foundations and sowing, another better left alone. Al-Dabaran, from the worked example, is a mansion of discord in the tradition, good for separation and ruin and little you would want to begin.

That is the whole use of finding her mansion: to start with the day, not against it. The tracker shows today’s station and the next ingress, so you can wait the hour or two for a kinder lodging when the one overhead does not suit the work. She never stays long.