East-Northeast

East-northeast is a bearing of 67.5 degrees, midway between east and northeast. Sixteen-point and thirty-two-point divisions of the horizon appear in more than one tradition. The Roman wind-rose named twelve winds, the Greek Tower of the Winds in Athens is octagonal and carries eight, and the Chinese compass school works with a ring of twenty-four mountains, that is, twenty-four directions of fifteen degrees each, built from the eight trigrams, the ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches. None of these divisions matches the others, which is a useful reminder that the number of directions a culture recognises is a choice rather than a fact about the horizon. The modern convention of 360 degrees measured clockwise from north is itself inherited from Babylonian sexagesimal arithmetic.

East-northeast is one of the thirty-two points of the traditional mariner's compass rose, bisecting east and northeast at 67.5 degrees. The thirty-two-point system descends from the classical wind rose, the ancient practice of naming directions for the winds that blew from them; the Tower of the Winds in Athens, built in the first century BCE, depicts eight wind deities on its eight faces, Boreas from the north, Kaikias from the northeast, and so on around the compass, a scheme the Roman writer Vitruvius also describes. Medieval and early modern navigators expanded this eight-wind framework first to sixteen and then to thirty-two named points, layering a technical navigational vocabulary onto what had originally been a set of named winds rather than abstract bearings.

East-northeast, at 67.5 degrees, falls on the boundary between the mountain Yin, the branch of the tiger, and the mountain Jia, a heavenly stem lying between the tiger and due east.

The Chinese geomantic compass, the luopan, carries twenty-four mountains of fifteen degrees each: twelve earthly branches, eight heavenly stems, and the four trigrams Qian, Gen, Xun and Kun holding the intercardinal corners. Sixteen and twenty-four are not commensurable in a way that would let the European rose and the Chinese ring share their intermediate points, so beyond the eight principal directions the two systems have nothing in common.

The tiger arc is a busy one. It stands next to Gen, the corner trigram of the northeast, and in the twelve-branch naming of the Japanese horizon the pairing of ox and tiger gives the demon gate its name. Yin is also the double hour from three in the morning to five, the last watch before dawn, and the first month of the lunar year in the traditional calendar, which is why the tiger opens the animal cycle in the reckoning of months even though the rat opens it in the reckoning of years.

A bearing taken here is therefore a straightforward navigational fix in one tradition and an unreadable line in the other. Neither system is finer than the other; they are cut differently, and a table that maps one onto the other point by point is inventing agreements that are not there.