Al Baldah, the City

Al Baldah is the twenty-first lunar mansion, spanning roughly 257 to 270 degrees within Sagittarius. Its name means the city or the district, an empty patch of sky with few bright stars. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Saturn, and its traditional talismanic virtue is harvest and travel, favourable for reaping and for journeys. 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 sparse region in Sagittarius that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly circuit through the ecliptic.

Al Baldah's name, the city or the district, is unusual among the manazil for describing an empty region of sky rather than a specific star or asterism, a comparatively starless stretch of Sagittarius that medieval Arabic astronomers evidently felt needed a mansion assigned to it regardless of the absence of a bright marking star, illustrating that the twenty-eight-fold division was fundamentally a division of arc length along the ecliptic rather than a catalogue of notable star groups first and a division of the circle only incidentally. Its virtue of harvest and travel, favourable for both reaping and journeys, is one of several manazil, including Al Sarfah and Al Fargh al Thani elsewhere in the series, whose beneficial agricultural associations may again trace back to the older anwa' seasonal-marker tradition rather than to the talismanic literature alone.