Sa'd al Akhbiyah

Sa'd al Akhbiyah is the twenty-fifth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 308 to 321 degrees within Aquarius. Its name means the lucky one of the tents or hidden things, the last of the sa'd mansions. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mars, and its traditional talismanic virtue is revenge and siege, the paying back of an enemy and the pressing of a blockade. Each of the twenty-eight manazil carries such a fixed magical property from the Arabic literature, used in electional and talismanic magic 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 group in the body of Aquarius that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Sa'd al Akhbiyah closes the run of five sa'd mansions, its own name, the lucky one of the tents or hidden things, referring to an asterism read as a cluster of tent-shapes or hidden enclosures in the Arabian sky-lore, though, as with several names in this stretch of the table, the precise referent is not perfectly settled across surviving manuscripts. Its virtue of revenge and siege breaks the auspicious pattern otherwise associated with the sa'd mansions, a reminder that the shared naming element marking these five stations as fortunate did not extend uniformly to every specific talismanic property assigned within the group, and that the sa'd label itself likely predates, and was only partially reconciled with, the later systematised virtues recorded by the Picatrix.

The twenty eight mansions divide the ecliptic by the Moon rather than by the Sun, and that single choice is what makes the scheme unlike the zodiac beside it. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Sa'd al Akhbiyah is the twenty fifth of them, running from 8 degrees 34 minutes of Aquarius to 21 degrees 26 minutes of Aquarius. The Moon's mean daily motion of about thirteen degrees eleven minutes is slightly more than one mansion, so it completes the circuit of all twenty eight in the sidereal month of twenty seven and a third days, not in the twenty nine and a half of the synodic month the phases follow.

The Arabic manazil al qamar reached Latin Europe through translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the magical use of the mansions travelled with the astronomical scheme rather than after it. Agrippa set out all twenty eight with their degrees and their operations in the second book of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and that chapter, not any Arabic original, is where almost every later English language list comes from. Sa'd al Akhbiyah is a transliteration, and the spellings vary widely between sources.

There is a problem in those degrees that the printed lists rarely flag. The mansions are named for star groups, but the boundaries above are measured in the tropical zodiac, anchored to the equinox, which drifts against the stars at about one degree every seventy two years. The Arabic scheme was fixed to the stars themselves. Something close to twenty degrees of precession has accumulated since the medieval transmission, so a mansion's tropical degrees no longer contain the stars it is named after. Both readings are in circulation and neither is a misprint.