Above Beside the Four Cardinal Directions

Several Indigenous North American traditions describe a directional scheme of six or seven directions rather than the four familiar from a compass rose: the four cardinal points, a Center, and Above and Below completing the set. Specific naming, ordering and ceremonial use of the scheme vary considerably between individual nations, and the atlas does not treat any one tribal version as representative of all of them, but the underlying structure, adding a vertical pair to the horizontal four, recurs widely enough to be treated as a distinct pattern in its own right.

East Asian geomantic systems handle the vertical dimension differently again: Feng Shui's compass work is built primarily around the horizontal plane and the twenty-four mountains of its compass rose, with height and elevation treated through separate principles of a site's form rather than folded into the same directional scheme as North, East, South and West.