Sa'd Bula, the Fortunate Devourer

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.