Sa'd al Dhabih

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.

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 Dhabih is the twenty second of them, running from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Capricorn to 12 degrees 51 minutes of Capricorn. 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 Dhabih 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.