Tag Archives: literary oddities

“North * South * East * West

East and West have always been known to mankind as the places where the sun rises and where the sun sets. Indeed our very word ‘east’ is derived from the proto Indo-Aryan ‘aus-to,’ which means ‘towards the sunrise.’ Our obedience to the primacy of north (such as the arrow on the compass and the orientation of our maps) is a more recent shift. It is derived from ’ner’ (‘down’). All the earliest maps, as drawn by the Chinese and Muslim cartographers, are orientated with south as ‘up,’ just as the Emperor of China always sat on his throne facing south, towards harmony and prosperity.

The mystical writer John Mitchell examined how the sense of belonging to a point of the compass has brought out different natures in humanity. The north is the traditional land of warriors and iron-hard men, the east is the land of merchants and financiers, the south is the place for music, dance, and emotional activity, and the west is the home of history, poetry and scholarship as well as the direction of enlightenment. It is curious how often this applies.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.