Al Shaulah, the Sting of the Scorpion

Al Shaulah is the nineteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 231 to 244 degrees within Scorpio and Sagittarius, at the raised sting of the Scorpion's tail. Its name means the sting. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is siege and hunting, the besieging of a place and the taking of a quarry. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic literature, used in the timing of talismans and transmitted to the Latin West through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than claims about the stars, which here are the pair at the Scorpion's stinger that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly circuit.

Al Shaulah's identification with the raised sting at the Scorpion's tail is anchored by the stars lambda and upsilon Scorpii, a pair bright enough, though positioned quite far south for medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern observers, to have been reliably tracked across the surviving Arabic sources despite their low altitude from more northern latitudes. The mansion's virtue of siege and hunting, aggressive workings paired together, continues the pattern of harsher assignments clustered through the Scorpio-region stations of the manazil, Al Qalb's discord and sedition immediately preceding it and this mansion's own siege and hunting following, a run of difficult virtues jyotishis and practitioners of the parallel Indian scheme would recognise as analogous to Jyeshtha and Mula's own reputation for intensity at a similar point in the nakshatra sequence.