South-Southwest

South-southwest is a bearing of 202.5 degrees, midway between south and southwest. Where a tradition does recognise more than the four or eight familiar directions, it usually adds the vertical and the centre rather than subdividing the horizon further. Buddhist cosmology commonly speaks of the ten directions, the four cardinals, the four intercardinals, the zenith and the nadir, and the phrase the Buddhas of the ten directions covers the whole of space in that sense. Jain and Hindu schemes use similar sets. Mesoamerican cosmology counts the four quarters and the centre as five directions, with the vertical axis running through the centre as the world tree. Adding up and down, rather than splitting the horizon, is the more usual way of getting beyond four, and it produces a genuinely three-dimensional scheme rather than a finer compass.

South-southwest is one of the thirty-two points of the traditional mariner's compass rose, bisecting south and southwest at 202.5 degrees. The thirty-two-point compass card, painted or engraved onto the face of a magnetic compass, became a standard fixture of European navigation from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onward, commonly ornamented with a fleur-de-lis marking north, a convention some historians trace to the compass card's early association with the House of Anjou, though the exact origin of the symbol's adoption for this purpose is not established with certainty. The finer thirty-two-point graduation allowed pilots to steer and to record a ship's course with considerably greater precision than the older eight-point wind rose permitted.

South-southwest, at 202.5 degrees, sits on the boundary between the mountain Ding, a heavenly stem lying just west of due south, and the mountain Wei, the branch of the goat.

The Chinese geomantic compass, the luopan, carries twenty-four mountains of fifteen degrees each. The ring runs twelve earthly branches, eight heavenly stems and the four corner trigrams, and it is read to a mountain rather than to a point between two. The European rose reaches its sixteen points by halving, and the arithmetic guarantees that each of its eight secondary bearings falls on a seam.

This particular seam is close to a boundary that matters more than most, since Kun, the corner trigram of the southwest, begins at 217.5 degrees, and Wei fills the fifteen degrees between the goat and that corner. Wei is also one of the four branches counted as a storehouse position, the gathering point of the Wood phase in the cycle used for that purpose, and in the reckoning of hours it is the double hour from one in the afternoon to three.

The general lesson holds here as everywhere on the ring. A bearing is not a neutral quantity that can be handed between traditions unchanged: it means something only inside a division of the horizon, and the divisions genuinely differ. Twenty-four mountains and thirty-two points describe the same sky and cannot be laid over one another without loss.