Sa'd al Dhabih, the Lucky Star of the Slaughterer

Sa'd al Dhabih is the twenty-second lunar mansion, spanning roughly 270 to 282 degrees within Capricorn. Its name means the lucky one of the slaughterer, the first of a series of mansions whose names begin with sa'd, meaning good fortune. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Sun, and its traditional talismanic virtue is healing and escape, the curing of the sick and the freeing of captives. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa for the timing of talismans. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition rather than statements about the stars, which here are the group in Capricorn that the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly passage.

Sa'd al Dhabih opens a run of five consecutive mansions in the series whose names all begin with sa'd, good fortune, the densest concentration of any shared naming element among the twenty-eight and a strong indication that this stretch of the ecliptic, corresponding roughly to Capricorn and Aquarius, was regarded as an unusually auspicious portion of the manazil scheme as a whole. The specific epithet, the lucky one of the slaughterer, is usually explained by reference to the star's rising alongside the season for slaughtering livestock in the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar, tying the name to a practical agricultural and pastoral rhythm rather than to any narrated myth, consistent with how several of the fainter or more workaday manazil names originate.