Al Shaulah

Al Shaulah is the nineteenth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 231 to 244 degrees within Scorpio and Sagittarius, at the raised sting of the Scorpion's tail. Its name means the sting. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Venus, and its traditional talismanic virtue is siege and hunting, the besieging of a place and the taking of a quarry. 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 pair at the Scorpion's stinger that the mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly circuit.

Al Shaulah's identification with the raised sting at the Scorpion's tail is anchored by the stars lambda and upsilon Scorpii, a pair bright enough, though positioned quite far south for medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern observers, to have been reliably tracked across the surviving Arabic sources despite their low altitude from more northern latitudes. The mansion's virtue of siege and hunting, aggressive workings paired together, continues the pattern of harsher assignments clustered through the Scorpio-region stations of the manazil, Al Qalb's discord and sedition immediately preceding it and this mansion's own siege and hunting following, a run of difficult virtues jyotishis and practitioners of the parallel Indian scheme would recognise as analogous to Jyeshtha and Mula's own reputation for intensity at a similar point in the nakshatra sequence.

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. Al Shaulah is the nineteenth of them, running from 21 degrees 26 minutes of Scorpio to 4 degrees 17 minutes of Sagittarius. 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. Al Shaulah 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.