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Where 67.5 Degrees Falls on the Luopan

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Where 67.5 Degrees Falls on the Luopan

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.

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