Sa'd al Suud

Sa'd al Suud is the twenty-fourth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 295 to 308 degrees within Aquarius. Its name means the luckiest of the fortunate ones, reckoned the most auspicious of the sa'd mansions. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Jupiter, and its traditional talismanic virtue is marriage and victory, favourable for weddings and for triumph over rivals. 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 Aquarius that the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon in its monthly circuit through the ecliptic.

Sa'd al Suud, reckoned the luckiest of the sa'd group and, by extension, sometimes described in the medieval sources as the most fortunate of all twenty-eight manazil, anchors its virtue of marriage and victory to a reputation that outlasted the specific talismanic tradition recorded in the Picatrix, surfacing also in general medieval Arabic folk astrology as a byword for good luck independent of the mansion scheme's formal magical apparatus. Its identification with stars in Aquarius is less secure in the surviving sources than the identification of the brighter manazil elsewhere in the series, a recurring caveat for several of the fainter stations clustered through this stretch of the zodiac.

Where the zodiac cuts the ecliptic into twelve, the manazil cut it into twenty eight, and the number comes from the Moon's daily motion rather than from any figure in the sky. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Sa'd al Suud is the twenty fourth of them, running from 25 degrees 43 minutes of Capricorn to 8 degrees 34 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 Suud 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.