Shatabhisha is the twenty-fourth nakshatra, from 306 degrees 40 minutes to 320 degrees of the sidereal zodiac in Aquarius. Its Vimshottari ruler is Rahu, its presiding deity is Varuna, god of the cosmic waters and the moral order, and its symbol is an empty circle, read as the hundred physicians or hundred stars its name recalls. The name means the hundred healers. Jyotisha reads Shatabhisha through healing, secrecy, and the veiling circle, the enclosure that both hides and protects, the medicine that works unseen, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. Varuna's association gives it a theme of hidden law and cleansing waters. These are interpretive conventions of the tradition, laid over the faint scattered stars of Aquarius that Indian astronomy assigns to this segment.
Shatabhisha's padas run through Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Varuna in the earliest Vedic hymns is a figure of considerable cosmic authority, guardian of rita, the moral and physical order of the universe, and enforcer of oaths through the noose with which he is traditionally depicted binding oathbreakers, an office that only later narrowed toward the more limited later-Puranic role of ocean god; Shatabhisha's presiding deity therefore carries an older and weightier charge than the water association alone suggests. The mansion is, with Ardra and Swati, one of three under Rahu's Vimshottari rulership, and its reading as a mansion of secrecy and hidden medicine is sometimes explained by jyotishis as this shared shadow-planet influence expressing itself through Varuna's own association with what is unseen and unspoken.