Mars and Mercury, by the Horn

El Nath is given the nature of Mars with Mercury in the tradition, read for fortune, eminence and quarrels, and for luck of a kind that must be seized, a delineation carried by Robson from the earlier compilers. The reasoning, so far as any is offered, is the usual one for a star on the point of a weapon or horn: the martial temperament follows the shape. Ptolemy treats the stars in the horns of the Bull as Mars-like. The star's real distinction is positional and historical, a bright marker on the ecliptic's northern edge that two constellations once claimed.

The "butting" sense of al-natih reflects a wider habit in Arabic star nomenclature of naming a star for the action or posture of the part of the animal it marks rather than simply the body part itself, a slightly more vivid convention than the plainer "tail" and "head" names that dominate elsewhere in these tables. The martial reading given to El Nath is shared, in general terms, with Bellatrix and the other shoulder and horn stars of this stretch of winter sky, part of a broadly consistent classical treatment of weapon-like and pointed stellar positions as Mars-natured. Robson's specific wording for El Nath draws on the same nineteenth-century compilations that supply most of the bright-star delineations gathered across this whole catalogue.