*Detail of* There You Stand Like a Palm by Judy Chicago, 1999, *via her site*

or: The Brand on the Camel’s Neck, The Twins’ 4 Feet, The Leaners

Tropical coordinates: approximately 29º23 Gemini - 12º14 Cancer

Letter: و wāw

Indicators: the five stars indicating the feet of the Twins—primarily Alhena, γ Geminorum and Tejat, μ Geminorum but also ν, η, and ξ Geminorum. Betelgeuse is also part of this station’s story.

Plants: Al-Buni gives us burdock and mugwort, two bitter plants, while ibn al-Hatim gives us camphor and oud, two fragrances with very different smells. Anything else is basically speculation but any plant that brings lovers together would be good to try. I’ve tried roses for example.

Substances: Sweet and sticky things like mastic and other natural gums. Things that can be used to bind two things together (like wax or thread). Things that come in sets or pairs or otherwise conjure love and relationships.

Animals: Camels, especially, but surely also any of the other camelids like llamas or alpacas. Horses too, maybe? Other ideas are oddly graceful ungulates like antelope or giraffes, animals that are highly adapted to desert environments, animals that mate for life like swans or black-backed jackals, or any other romantic animals (voles?)

Angel: Anār(i) أنار

Al-Buni tells us that the verb hana’a means “to lean” or “incline towards” and that this station was named because it’s indicated by a line of stars all leaning towards their neighbor. Though I haven’t been able to find that verb in any of my dictionaries, it does make sense—this asterism looks like a line of stars appearing to almost dangle from the ecliptic. It has also been described often as a “mark” or a “brand” on the neck of a camel. Allen suggests that this manzil might also symbolize a camel’s hump.

Han’a is a very emotional manzil and perhaps a bit soft. It can be romantic or spurned and is inherently changeable and inconstant. It is a quite benevolent and auspicious station suitable for all kinds of workings involving love and relationships. Do note that we mean relationships in the broadest possible sense, including friendships of all kinds, even friendships with people who hold power over you.

Some key themes we’ll be exploring include:

Love, relationships, affection (romantic, platonic, and everything in between)
Interdependence and reciprocity, products of healthy relationship of all kinds that tie people together
The polarity of resilience and weakness. The camel may be able to forego water in the desert, but its humans cant. The body may be strong but the feelings may still be volatile
The refreshment of a thirsty traveler arriving at an oasis, the relief of access to healing medication and receiving of blessings from the divine

my personal gnosis

Woman with a pigeon by Sliman Mansour, 2013, via *Artists of Colour*

This essay on Han’a will be an interesting one because it’s the first example of a station that I, in all honesty, don’t know that much about yet. For the previous stations I’ve discussed, I either had built a long term personal relationship with or they were especially rich in accessible lore. The 6th station has neither. My only experience with this station was the single gnosis session we shared. I think I’ve come to learn a lot through these sessions but they only provide a momentary snapshot of the station which works best as a component of a wide-range of lore, interpretations and experiences.

My goal here (and with other stations who I have been able to learn less about) is to provide a collection of resources and symbols for the inspection of other Moon-observers. I hope to add more over time, and I pray that my efforts support others in their own experiments. May we add to the collected knowledge of these stellar angels!

Han’a’s gnosis session occurred on December’s full Moon in 2023, the day after Christmas. I had come back to my hometown to see my family which was a very emotionally intense visit. The day of the full Moon I had the opportunity to reconnect with an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in several years, a former coworker. Our somewhat chance meeting ended up becoming the ground upon which we rekindled our dormant friendship. We planned to meet for coffee for an hour or two which became spending the whole day hanging out and reconnecting about our lives, our relationships, our jobs, our other old friends, our new hobbies and interests, proudly sharing the ways we’d grown up since we last spent time together in our early 20s.

After many hours, we finally parted ways shortly before sunset and I returned to my car in the parking lot of the bar we had ended up in at the end. The bar was in a busy part of town and the parking lot was full when we got there, so I ended up parking at the end of a neighborhood that butted up to a copse of trees.

Since I happened to have my grimoire with me, I decided to do my gnosis gathering session right there.

I spritzed my phylactery with the lime-scented perfume I had in my purse and performed the invocation of the Moon tucked behind a large live oak while the golden Moon rose full in the east.

a caravan of camels nestle in the rapidly cooling sand after the sun sets. their riders, lovers, cook food on the campfire then begin play some kind of stringed instrument and dance together. they fall to the ground, laughing and embrace each other in the moonlight. the camels, looking on, speak:
“i am the provider and the reconciler,
the joiner and the re-joiner.
i am succor, providence, divine provision
i am the spirits who lovingly hold the reins.
i am the desert rain and the celebration of completion.
return, return, o disparate ones,
return and dance together under my auspices.”

I completed the ritual with a huge stupid grin on my face—I may have even been laughing a bit. In my first meeting with Anāri, I found the spirit to have a graceful, feminine presence. You might even call it delicate?

Some of the manzil angels seem to arrive with a more singular presence, others are a group. I didn’t count the camels but there were roughly half a dozen—perhaps 5, one for each of the indicator stars? They did have quite an effect on me but it was an overwhelmingly positive one. I felt contented and buoyant afterwards. The bar was around an hour’s drive from where I was staying with my family and my entire trip back was near standstill traffic but I didn’t mind. I spent the whole ride blaring my music and singing.

During that car ride back I was flipping between the daily mix playlists that Spotify’s algorithms had generated for me. On one I came across a song I hadn’t heard in years, one that was very evocative of a specific time in my childhood where we spent a lot of time in the car driving all over town and uniformly listening to the radio. Later that week I was in a grocery store with my mom and my fiancé and the song came on and strongly evoked those memories again. That was when I realized it would be Han’a’s song.

And everything around her is a silver pool of light
The people who surround her feel the benefit of it
It makes you calm; she holds you captivated in her palm

a collection of starlore

In comparison to others, Han’a’s indicators take a backseat in global starlore and I wasn’t able to find a ton about even Alhena and Tejat, the brightest indicators.

Something I found interesting is that the size of the Han’a asterism doesn’t seem to be widely agreed upon—Al-Biruni says there are only two. Ibn al-Hātim agrees and names them as Az-Zara and Al-Mīzān. I believe these are meant to be Alhena (who was once called Al-Maisān) and Xi Geminorum (called Az-zir). Interestingly, these are the two feet of Pollux, the left twin, leaving out the dimmer stars of Castor’s feet. Al-Buni, on the other hand, makes the Han’a asterism much larger, including all 5 of the stars that symbolize the feet of Gemini in Greek astrology.

Danielle Adams of the Two Deserts, One Sky project (a very cool project!) highlights the history of the constellation of Jawzā’ in Arab culture before the assimilation of Greek star lore renamed that constellation to Orion. The stars the Greeks called Orion represented the body of Jawzā’, a feminine figure associated with winter, but stars from several other Hellenistic constellations were drawn into Jawzā’ as well. The five indicators of Han’a mentioned by al-Buni represented her bow (her qaws قوس, a bow as in a “bow and arrow”).

This will come up again throughout my project, but I think al-Han’a is best interpreted outside of Hellenistic culture. Some of the confusing contradictions in the stories of the 6th station can be straightened out by investigating the pre-Islamic Arab cultural relationships to these asterisms.

One point of confusion for me at the beginning of all of this was why the Indic 6th nakshatra is indicated by Betelgeuse while the 6th manzil is indicated by all these much dimmer stars. The answer lies in the story of Jawzā’.

Adams notes that Betelgeuse was originally conceived of as one of the hands of Jawzā’ and, once the lore of her bow became settled, Betelgeuse became known as the hand holding the bow. In fact some modern Arabic astronomy textbooks today call the star bayt al-qaws بيت القوس, “House of the Bow,” rather than the more common bat al-jawzā’ بت الجوزاء (”Armpit of Jawzā’” which gave us the name “Betelgeuse”).

This is an explanation for why Ardrā is indicated by Betelgeuse yet Han’a is indicated by this string of dim stars along the ecliptic.

I believe this story is an interesting example of the kind of cultural re-lexification the import of the lunar stations from India into Arab star culture described by Daniel Martin Varisco. These ancient astrologers didn’t just borrow the Indic system wholesale the way that later Islamicate astrologers borrowed and integrated Hellenistic astrology. Rather, they borrowed the schema underlying the Indic system but re-interpreted it through the lens of their own culture. [1]

thoughts on al-han’a • الهنعة

أَفَلَا يَنظُرُونَ إِلَى ٱلْإِبِلِ كَيْفَ خُلِقَتْ
Do they not ever reflect on camels—how they were [masterfully] created?
from Surat al-Ghāshiyyah, Qur’an 88:17

Slow Drag by Ernie Barnes, 1997 via *Google Arts & Culture*

The most salient symbol of Han’a to me is that of a group of camels leaning on each other. The camel is an interesting symbol—for me I mostly understand them in the abstract as I am not from a place where camels are common. It seems like they’re symbols of wealth, like many other commercially important livestock. They’re also known for their resilience due to their adaptation to extreme desert ecosystems. I think they might be at least a little bit romantic, or at least they are here. I wonder about their potential relationship to horses, the animal that serves a relatively similar role in my own cultures.

The camels lean together as a symbol of interdependence, which seems well-suited to this manzil. I really see its core meaning as interdependence. Sometimes we are the weak one, sometimes we are the resilient one, but when we bind ourselves to each other our fates become entwined. We have to share our resources and depend on each other to reach our shared dreams. Part of this, too, is being able to accept the support being extended to you.

Rather than pointing towards specific roles in a relationship, al-Han’a elevates the connection between the individual parts.

Warnock observes that the 6th manzil is flowing and lacks permanency. It’s about the polarity between people, not about its endurance. To me this suggests that Han’a is inherently dynamic. They all lean together so that if one falls they all fall. It also makes me think of the nomadic nature of many of the peoples who have camels most deeply embedded in their cultures.

If you’ve spent much time around ancient magic, you know how gruesome the love spells can get but the magic of the leaning camels isn’t anything like that. Ibn al-Hatim, one of my favorite recorders of manzil-lore, gives us a spell in which we bind together two wax figurines in an embrace then wrap it in a shining or white cloth to produce a talisman that brings us to both love and medical treatment. This isn’t a targeted spell to bind the will of another and force them to love you with threats of torment and nightmares but rather a spell to draw you, the practitioner, to love and healing. Isn’t that interesting? Rather than dragging a hottie kicking and screaming into your clutches, Anāri guides her supplicants to authentic connection. The inclusion of medical treatment in ibn al-Hatim’s entry on this station (and my own impressions of their presence) suggests that wholeness and affirmation are the traits this angel wishes to manifest in the world. Perhaps we could work with her for the kinds of emotional and spiritual healing that allow us to bring love into our lives.

Can we also talk about the symbolism of the brand?

A brand is a symbol of a relationship. I’ll admit that I don’t know a ton about camel husbandry but I am very familiar with the practices of branding horses and cattle. These brands are a symbolic representation of a relationship—anyone who finds a branded animal will know where it belongs. This symbol is explored in a particularly romantic passage from Shir ha-Shirim, The Song of Songs, a book of the Tanakh and Bible that is essentially ancient Hebrew erotica.

שִׂימֵ֨נִי כַֽחוֹתָ֜ם עַל־לִבֶּ֗ךָ כַּֽחוֹתָם֙ עַל־זְרוֹעֶ֔ךָ
Let me be a seal upon your heart, like the seal upon your arm.
from Shir ha-Shirim 8:7, see a moving performance of this passage by Ofra Haza

Is this what is meant by “brand” when people refer to the 6th manzil? I’m not sure but it’s a symbol I’d like to explore more in the future. I’d like to do a working of some sort one day with Anāri using portions of Shir ha-Shirim.

Speaking of Anāri, I’ve been taken by this angel’s name since I first learned of it. For me it immediately evoked the verb anāra أنار which means “to illuminate,” from the word نور nūr meaning “light.” This root brings us many common words (especially in spiritual contexts) having to do with the concept of light and illumination. Upon further research I realized that it’s also quite likely that her name comes from anār انار, Persian for “pomegranate.” This could be in line with some of the lore connecting Betelgeuse and the 6th station (it being one of the reddest stars in the sky).

I want to end with my thoughts on the letter assigned to Han’a: و wāw. The letter wāw in Arabic and Hebrew is the conjunction “and” and functions as a prefix in those languages, unable to stand alone. It’s also used in oaths to introduce a noun of great significance, as in the common interjection wallah والله which literally means something close to “I swear to god!” and colloquially just means “really!” or otherwise intensifies a phrase.

This is the first letter we’ve encountered in the pattern of 28 that can be pronounced as either a long vowel (the long ū sound in group) or a consonant (the w sound in water). There are three letters in this category in Arabic (wāw along with letter 1, alif, and letter 10, yā’) which are typically called ḥurūf al-līn wa-l-madd حروف اللين والمدّ, “consonants of softness and lengthening.” This refers to their having 2 pronunciations (one being a long vowel and the other being a very soft consonant). This is how I was introduced to them in my Arabic grammar classes, however I also learned that they are sometimes called “defective consonants” (حروف العلّة) because when they are included in roots, they have a tendency to disappear.

A great example is the verb Han’a’s angel makes me think of. The root for the word light has three consonants, N W R, however when they show up in the actual word for light (nūr) the word appears to only have two consonants in it—the wāw in the middle becomes a long vowel instead. When the same root shows up in the verb for “illuminate,” the wāw is lost entirely. These half-vowel, half-consonant letters were considered to be hollow, weak, defective or soft in comparison to the stronger letters we’ve encountered so far.

Notes

[1] Varisco, Daniel Martin. 1991. The Origin of the anwā’ in the Arab Tradition. Studia Islamica, 74, 5–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/1595894

6. han’a هنعة • the camels leaning on each other