Twenty-Four Mountains

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A Twenty-Four Mountains entry records a single named compass direction within the feng shui tradition's division of the horizon into twenty four equal sectors, its documented position on the compass, and what the tradition says that direction favors or governs. The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui sets out this compass system as a working measurement tool, read from a real physical instrument, the luopan compass, rather than as an abstract symbolic wheel with no practical use.

An entry records a mountain's documented compass position, its degree range, and the character, whether a Heavenly Stem, an Earthly Branch or one of the eight trigrams, that gives the sector its name, since the twenty four sectors are built from three different naming systems interlocked together rather than one single scheme.

Where a mountain's favorable or unfavorable use depends on a building's specific orientation and the year or period being calculated, an entry records that conditional, calculation dependent character honestly rather than presenting a fixed universal verdict for every use of that direction.

An entry also records which of the several documented feng shui schools a given reading of the mountain follows, since the manual's own account shows different schools weigh the twenty four mountains against different secondary factors, and a mountain judged favorable under one documented method is not automatically judged the same way under another.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Adam Smith's study of the Chinese sexagenary cycle traces the documented origin of the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches, the naming system behind ancient Chinese calendars and, much later, behind twelve of the twenty four compass mountains, back to a real, dated ritual and calendrical practice rather than a symbolic scheme invented for divination alone.

That documented origin matters for a Twenty-Four Mountains entry because a mountain named for a Stem or a Branch carries that character's own separate, older documented history, first attested in calendar keeping centuries before it was ever applied to a compass, and an entry records that older layer of meaning honestly alongside the mountain's later feng shui use.

A Twenty-Four Mountains entry therefore records which of the three naming systems, Stem, Branch or trigram, a given mountain belongs to, and where useful notes that character's own separate documented history, since Smith's own research shows the stems and branches were a real historical system long before feng shui adopted them for compass reckoning. That layered history is part of what makes the compass a documented system rather than an arbitrary one.

Smith's account also traces the stems and branches to specific documented divinatory and ritual uses that predate feng shui by many centuries, evidence an entry can draw on to distinguish a mountain's inherited calendrical character from any meaning added specifically for compass reading.