North Northeast

North-northeast is a bearing of 22.5 degrees, one of the sixteen points that result from bisecting the eight principal directions, and one of the thirty-two points of the full compass rose used in navigation. The thirty-two-point rose is a European development of the medieval and early modern period, growing out of the wind-roses of the Mediterranean and reaching its familiar form with the widespread use of the magnetic compass from the twelfth century onward; the practice of naming all thirty-two points in order, boxing the compass, was a standard test of a seaman's competence and survived in training into the twentieth century, when degrees replaced points for most purposes. Secondary points of this kind belong to navigation and surveying rather than to any symbolic system: no major cosmological tradition assigns a distinct meaning to a sixteenth of the circle, and the atlas records them for completeness of the compass rather than because a doctrine attaches to them.

The Chinese geomantic compass, the luopan, divides the horizon into twenty-four mountains rather than sixteen or thirty-two points. Each mountain spans fifteen degrees, and the ring is built from the twelve earthly branches, eight of the ten heavenly stems, and the four trigrams that hold the corners.

Because twenty-four does not divide evenly against sixteen, the two systems interleave rather than align. North-northeast, at 22.5 degrees, falls exactly on the boundary between the mountain Gui, a heavenly stem occupying the arc just east of due north, and the mountain Chou, the branch of the ox. Every one of the eight secondary points of the European rose lands on a mountain boundary in the same way, and none of them lands on a mountain centre. The two divisions of the horizon share only the four cardinals and the four intercardinals.

That matters in practice as well as arithmetically. A luopan is read to a mountain, not to a boundary, and a sitting or facing direction taken exactly on the line between two mountains is not a usable reading in the compass schools: it is ambiguous by construction, and the traditions treat such a line as something to move off rather than to build on.

The branch Chou also names a double hour, one in the morning to three, and a month, so the same character on the ring carries a direction, a time of day and a season at once. That layering is what a luopan is for.