Al Hana, the Mansion of the Brand

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.