The Astrology of Sahl b. Bishr: Volume I: Principles, Elections, Questions, Nativities Paperback – Illustrated, 8 Mar. 2019

Fabulous book ...I would recommend all of this authors books...money well spent.

Professor Dykes has done a fantastic job of translating this material for the first ever directly from the Arabic manuscripts. His Introductions to this material are of a class for themselves with very helpful study guides, diagrams and tables. This is a master work! If you are interested in medieval astrology as it was practiced then this is an absolute must to read!

The book is mostly made up of Sahl's work on nativities, along with by his short introduction and equally short guides to elections and horaries. The book on nativities incorporates most of the content of the Book of Aristotle (Persian Nativities 1), so if you have that you only need this if you have enrolled in Dykes's course, for which this is a textbook. But this is a better buy and more readable. Whether the modern astrologer really needs this is debatable: most of the worth-while techniques of the medieval astrologer entered the mainstream.Dykes cannot be called a good translator. The task requires three things: command of the source language, background knowledge, and ability to express the meaning of the text in the target language. He certainly meets the first requirement: I've compared one his translations from Latin with the original and a couple from Arabic with other versions. He doesn't always have enough background knowledge — he should have supplemented reading the texts he translated with study of the evidence of actual practice. He certainly cannot render the content in acceptable English, often replacing accepted terms by literal rendering of the original. It is not accurate to write stakes, bounds, houses, assembly, and convertible for angles, terms, domiciles, conjunction, and cardinal; it's just bad practice. The index is amateurish. Thus in the text the term for the prenatal syzygy is translated as the "meeting and fullness", but none of this appears in the index, where the passage is listed under "lunation". Dykes should have read a book of the art of translation and another on indexing!