Sa'd Bula

Sa'd Bula is the twenty-third lunar mansion, spanning roughly 282 to 295 degrees within Capricorn and Aquarius. Its name is glossed as the lucky one of the swallower, another of the fortunate sa'd mansions. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Moon, and its traditional talismanic virtue is liberation and healing, the freeing of the bound and the mending of the sick. 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 group along the Capricorn-Aquarius border that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Sa'd Bula continues the run of five fortunate sa'd mansions begun at Sa'd al Dhabih, its own epithet, the lucky one of the swallower, again explained through a pastoral or seasonal reference now only partially recoverable from the surviving Arabic sources rather than through any developed myth. The virtue of liberation and healing assigned to this station, freeing the bound and mending the sick, fits the broader pattern of the sa'd group as a cluster of benevolent mansions, in contrast to the harsher stations concentrated instead around the Scorpio-region manazil discussed earlier in the series, a genuine unevenness in how the twenty-eight stations distribute their favourable and difficult virtues around the circle rather than an artifact of modern reading.

A mansion is a night's travel. The system exists because the Moon covers roughly one twenty eighth of the circle between one nightfall and the next. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Sa'd Bula is the twenty third of them, running from 12 degrees 51 minutes of Capricorn to 25 degrees 43 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 Bula 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.