Al Butain is the second lunar mansion, spanning roughly 12 to 25 degrees of the ecliptic within Aries. Its name means the little belly, referring to a group of faint stars in the body of the Ram. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is the Moon, and its traditional talismanic virtue is treasure and retention, the finding and holding of wealth. The twenty-eight mansions carry a planetary rulership that cycles through the seven classical planets four times around the circle, and a fixed magical property drawn from the Arabic and Latin talismanic literature. These are distinct from the Vedic nakshatras that divide the same ecliptic into twenty-seven. The attributions here belong to the electional and talismanic tradition of the manazil, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa, rather than to the astronomy of the stars themselves.
Al Butain's identifying stars are usually given as the small triangle of epsilon, delta and rho2 Arietis, a fainter grouping than the two horn-stars of the mansion before it. The Picatrix, the medieval Arabic grimoire known in its original as the Ghayat al-Hakim and transmitted into Latin in the thirteenth century, is the principal surviving source for the specific talismanic images to be engraved under each mansion, and its instructions typically specify the image, the metal, and the incense appropriate to the working, a level of ritual detail Agrippa's later Latin compilation preserves in abbreviated form. Western transliteration of the Arabic mansion names varies considerably between sources, and Al Butain also appears in older English astrological literature as Boteyn or Botain, spellings that reflect the manuscript's transmission through Latin and Old French intermediaries rather than direct Arabic scholarship.