The Luckiest of the Lucky

The name carries the delineation. The tradition reads Sadalsuud as one of the most fortunate of stars, and Robson gives it the nature of Saturn with Mercury, reading it for good fortune of a steady and lasting kind and for success in matters of the mind and of substance. It is an unusually benign entry in a catalogue heavy with menace, and its cheerful reputation rests as much on the meaning of its ancient name as on any planetary pairing. Whatever weight one gives the astrology, the star itself is a genuine rarity, a luminous, Sun-coloured supergiant, the brightest light of the Water-bearer, shining across more than five hundred light years.

At roughly five hundred and forty light years, Sadalsuud's light left the star well before the founding of most of the historical schools of astrology discussed elsewhere in this atlas, a useful reminder of how directly the fixed-star tradition looks across time as well as space: the star an ancient astrologer named is not the star as it is now but as it was many centuries before that astrologer was born. No source earlier than the modern compiling tradition supplies Sadalsuud's specific Saturn-Mercury attribution, and its benign reputation appears to rest largely on the plain sense of its own fortunate Arabic name rather than on any distinct planetary doctrine.