Batn al Hut, the Belly of the Fish

Batn al Hut is the twenty-eighth and final lunar mansion, spanning roughly 347 to 360 degrees within Pisces and closing the circle of the Moon's stations. Its name means the belly of the fish, and it is identified with the region near the bright star of Andromeda drawn into the Fishes. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Saturn, and its traditional talismanic virtue is harvest and trade, favourable for reaping and commerce, bringing the round of mansions to a close on a note of increase. Each of the manazil carries a fixed magical property from the Arabic tradition, transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa. These are the conventions of that talismanic tradition; with this station the twenty-eight-mansion cycle completes and begins again at Al Sharatain.

Batn al Hut closes the twenty-eight-station circle, and its stars, drawn into the constellation later Western atlases call Pisces, sit at the same general region of sky where the tropical zodiac's own vernal equinox point has resided for roughly the last two thousand years, discussed at greater length in this atlas's entry on the sign Pisces; the manazil scheme, keyed to the sidereal positions of fixed stars rather than to the moving tropical equinox, is not affected by that precessional drift in the same way the tropical zodiac's own seasonal anchoring is. With this mansion the twenty-eight-station cycle completes and restarts at Al Sharatain, closing a circuit structurally parallel to, though never numerically aligned with, the twenty-seven-fold restart of the Indian nakshatras at Ashwini discussed in that table's own first entry.