Batn al Hut

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.

The twenty eight mansions divide the ecliptic by the Moon rather than by the Sun, and that single choice is what makes the scheme unlike the zodiac beside it. Each mansion is exactly twelve degrees fifty one minutes wide, one twenty eighth of three hundred and sixty. Batn al Hut is the twenty eighth of them, running from 17 degrees 09 minutes of Pisces to 0 degrees 00 minutes of Aries. 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. Batn al Hut 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.