Al Hana

Al Hana is the sixth lunar mansion, spanning roughly 64 to 77 degrees within Gemini. Its name is linked to a mark or brand, an asterism of faint stars near the feet of the Twins. In the manazil tradition its planetary ruler is Mercury, and its traditional talismanic virtue is hunting and revenge, a mansion the tradition assigned to the pursuit and overtaking of a quarry or an enemy. Like all the manazil it carries a fixed magical property drawn from the Arabic tradition and transmitted through the Picatrix and Agrippa for the timing of talismans. These are the conventions of that talismanic literature rather than statements about the stars, which here are the group in Gemini that the twenty-eight-mansion scheme counts at this station of the Moon.

Al Hana's name is linked in the Arabic sources to a mark or brand, similarly descriptive rather than mythological in origin, an asterism identified with faint stars near the feet of Gemini that different medieval star-lists place with some disagreement, since fainter manazil stars were less consistently catalogued across the surviving Arabic astronomical manuscripts than the brighter, more universally recognised ones. The pairing of hunting and revenge as this mansion's talismanic virtue belongs to a small cluster of manazil, including Al Tarf and Sa'd al Akhbiyah elsewhere in the series, given to aggressive or retributive workings, a category the Picatrix and its Latin successors treat with the same procedural specificity as the more benign mansions of love or healing.

Where the zodiac cuts the ecliptic into twelve, the manazil cut it into twenty eight, and the number comes from the Moon's daily motion rather than from any figure in the sky. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Al Hana is the sixth of them, running from 4 degrees 17 minutes of Gemini to 17 degrees 09 minutes of Gemini. The Moon's mean daily motion of about thirteen degrees eleven minutes is slightly more than one mansion, so it completes the circuit of all twenty eight in the sidereal month of twenty seven and a third days, not in the twenty nine and a half of the synodic month the phases follow.

The Arabic manazil al qamar reached Latin Europe through translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the magical use of the mansions travelled with the astronomical scheme rather than after it. Agrippa set out all twenty eight with their degrees and their operations in the second book of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and that chapter, not any Arabic original, is where almost every later English language list comes from. Al Hana is a transliteration, and the spellings vary widely between sources.

There is a problem in those degrees that the printed lists rarely flag. The mansions are named for star groups, but the boundaries above are measured in the tropical zodiac, anchored to the equinox, which drifts against the stars at about one degree every seventy two years. The Arabic scheme was fixed to the stars themselves. Something close to twenty degrees of precession has accumulated since the medieval transmission, so a mansion's tropical degrees no longer contain the stars it is named after. Both readings are in circulation and neither is a misprint.