West-Southwest

West-southwest is a bearing of 247.5 degrees, midway between west and southwest. The secondary points are recorded here to complete the compass, and their inclusion raises a fair question about where a correspondence system should stop. Traditional schemes divide the horizon into as many parts as their purpose requires: four for a ritual orientation, eight for a trigram scheme, twelve for a Roman wind-rose, sixteen or thirty-two for European navigation, twenty-four for the Chinese compass school, thirty-two for the Arab star compass, and 360 for modern surveying. None of these is more correct than another; each answers a different need. The atlas records sixteen points and the centre, which is enough to place any of the eight-part traditional systems and to name a bearing with reasonable precision, without pretending that a doctrine attaches to every sixteenth of the circle.

West-southwest is one of the thirty-two points of the traditional mariner's compass rose, bisecting west and southwest at 247.5 degrees. The point sits within what navigators traditionally call the third quadrant of the compass, running from south through west, and, like the other twenty-eight non-cardinal, non-intercardinal points, it was named according to a fixed compounding rule rather than assigned any independent traditional or cosmological symbolism of the kind attached to the eight principal points elsewhere on this site; the thirty-two-point system is a technical navigational instrument, descended from the classical wind rose but developed for practical seamanship, and its finer points did not accumulate the deity, colour and element associations that the cardinal and intercardinal directions carry across Vedic, Chinese, Mesoamerican and other cosmological schemes.

West-southwest, at 247.5 degrees, falls on the boundary between the mountain Shen, the branch of the monkey, and the mountain Geng, a heavenly stem lying between the monkey and due west.

On the luopan the horizon is cut into twenty-four mountains of fifteen degrees: the twelve earthly branches, eight of the ten heavenly stems, and the four trigrams Qian, Gen, Xun and Kun at the corners. Sixteen-point and twenty-four-mountain divisions share the eight principal directions and nothing beyond them, so every secondary point of the European rose lands exactly where a Chinese reading refuses to be taken.

Shen sits immediately clockwise of Kun, the southwest corner trigram, and it is one of the four branches treated as a beginning position in the cycle of phases, the point at which the Metal phase is reckoned to start. It is also the double hour from three to five in the afternoon.

Geng, like all the stems on the ring, has no animal and no hour of its own. The stems are there to subdivide the cardinal arcs finely enough for the compass to be useful, which is why they cluster around the four cardinal branches rather than being spread evenly. That asymmetry is deliberate and it is another reason the ring cannot be mapped onto a rose built by repeated halving: the luopan is denser where it needs to be and the rose is uniform.