Al Baldah

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.

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. Al Baldah is the twenty first of them, running from 17 degrees 09 minutes of Sagittarius to 0 degrees 00 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. Al Baldah 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.