West

West, a bearing of 270 degrees, is the quarter of sunset, and it carries in a great many traditions the associations of ending, of the dead, and of what lies beyond. In Egyptian religion the west is the land of the dead without qualification: the necropolis lies on the west bank of the Nile, the dead are called westerners, and Osiris bears the title Foremost of the Westerners; the goddess Amentet personifies the west.

Greek myth places the Hesperides and the isles of the blest in the far west, Celtic tradition places its otherworld islands there, and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism places Amitabha's western paradise, Sukhavati, in that quarter, which is why Pure Land practitioners face west. Chinese cosmology gives the west the metal phase, autumn, the White Tiger and the trigram Dui, and treats it as the quarter of harvest, gathering-in and, in the Han imagination, of the immortals of Kunlun.

The west is a good place to notice how far colour-direction schemes differ. The Maya and Mesoamerican scheme gives east red, north white, west black and south yellow, with blue-green at the centre. The Chinese five-phase scheme gives east blue-green, south red, west white, north black and centre yellow. The Tibetan and Indian schemes differ again, as do the various Native American medicine-wheel traditions, which vary considerably from nation to nation and are not a single system despite frequent popular claims that they are. There is no universal correspondence of colours to directions, and any source that presents one as though it were universal is generalising from a single tradition. Where the atlas records a colour with a direction it belongs to the named system, and readers should not carry it across.

The Navajo (Dine) tradition offers one specific, well-documented example of a colour-direction scheme distinct from both the Maya and Chinese systems already noted here: its cosmology names four sacred mountains marking the boundaries of the traditional Navajo homeland, Dine Bikeyah, each associated with a direction and a colour, white in the east (Blanca Peak), blue in the south (Mount Taylor), yellow in the west (the San Francisco Peaks) and black in the north (Hesperus Mountain). This is a specific, named system belonging to one Native American nation rather than evidence of a single pan-Indian colour-direction scheme; other Native American nations maintain their own distinct and not necessarily compatible directional colour associations, consistent with this atlas's general caution against treating "Native American tradition" as a single system.