Northeast

Northeast, a bearing of 45 degrees, is one of the four intercardinal or ordinal directions that bisect the quarters. Intercardinal points matter more in some systems than in others. In Chinese feng shui and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the eight trigrams the intercardinals are full members of the scheme, northeast holding the trigram Gen, the mountain and keeping still, and the eight-part division is fundamental to the practice; the compass school of feng shui works with a ring of twenty-four directions built on this base. In Hindu Vastu Shastra the northeast, called Ishanya after a form of Shiva, is the most auspicious quarter of a plot, reserved for water, for the shrine and for open space, and building heavily on it is avoided. By contrast the Greek and Roman wind-roses, and the Golden Dawn quarters, treat the intercardinals as subordinate.

In Hindu Vastu Shastra, the eight-direction scheme of guardian deities, the dikpalas, assigns the northeast to Ishana, an aspect of Shiva, and treats the quarter as the most sacred and auspicious of the eight, favoured for the household shrine (puja room) and for water sources, on the reasoning that it receives the first light of the rising sun's approach and sits opposite the inauspicious southwest across the diagonal of a building's plan. In Chinese Bagua cosmology, the corresponding trigram is Gen, the Mountain, carrying the Earth phase and associated with stillness, self-cultivation and, in Feng Shui applied to interior space, with knowledge; the pairing of Ishana and Gen in the same quarter across two independent traditions is a coincidence of two unrelated systems rather than evidence of shared origin.

Two Asian systems give the northeast far more weight than the European compass rose does, and they arrive at opposite valuations of the same bearing.

In Vastu Shastra, the Indian tradition of building, the eight quarters are assigned to the dikpalas, the guardians of the directions, and the northeast belongs to Ishana, a form of Shiva. It is the most auspicious quarter in the whole scheme. The northeast corner of a plot is where water is placed and where the household shrine goes, the ground there is kept low and open, and the standard prescriptions treat building heavily on that corner as among the worst things that can be done to a site.

Japanese practice inherited an eight-quarter scheme through Chinese onmyodo and reached the reverse conclusion. The northeast is the kimon, the demon gate, the quarter through which malign influence enters. In the twelve-branch naming of the horizon it is ushitora, the ox-tiger direction, which is the reason the Japanese oni is conventionally drawn with ox horns and a tiger-skin loincloth. Temples were founded northeast of the capital to guard it on that side, and domestic layouts avoided putting a kitchen or a lavatory there.

Both are eight-quarter systems, both are used to site buildings, and both were formalised in cultures in long contact with one another. That they disagree this sharply about one bearing is a standing corrective to any attempt to build a single table of directional correspondence across traditions.