Southeast

Southeast, a bearing of 135 degrees, holds the trigram Xun, the gentle, wind and wood, in the Later Heaven arrangement, and in Chinese practice it is associated with growth, with gradual influence and, in the popular eight-aspiration scheme used in feng shui, with wealth. In Hindu Vastu the southeast is Agneya, the quarter of Agni, fire, and is the prescribed place for the kitchen and for the hearth, a rule still widely followed in domestic building in India. The correspondence of southeast with fire is one of the clearer cases of a practical reason underlying a symbolic one: in much of the subcontinent the southeast receives strong morning sun and the prevailing wind carries smoke away from the rest of the house. Directional systems of this kind commonly combine an observed convenience with a cosmological justification, and separating the two is not always possible.

In Hindu Vastu Shastra, the dikpala of the southeast is Agni, the Vedic god of fire, and the quarter is accordingly favoured for the kitchen and for anything involving heat or transformation, on the reasoning that placing the cooking fire under fire's own guardian direction avoids conflict between the room's function and its ruling element. In Chinese Bagua cosmology, the corresponding trigram is Xun, the Wind, carrying the Wood phase and associated in Feng Shui applied to interior space with wealth and abundance, an association that has made the southeast corner of a home or office one of the most commonly manipulated quarters in popular Feng Shui practice, hung with symbolic objects intended to attract prosperity. The two traditions' southeast associations, fire and wind respectively, are independent and not equivalent.

In Vastu Shastra the southeast belongs to Agni, fire, and the consequence is practical rather than decorative: the kitchen is placed in that corner, and where a plan cannot manage it the tradition offers the northwest as the second choice. Anything involving heat, from the hearth to, in modern adaptations of the rules, the electrical supply, is drawn toward the same quarter. The dikpala scheme that produces this places Indra in the east, Yama in the south, Nirriti in the southwest, Varuna in the west, Vayu in the northwest, Kubera in the north and Ishana in the northeast, with Agni holding the southeast between Indra and Yama.

The Chinese Later Heaven arrangement puts the trigram Xun in the southeast, whose attributes are wind and wood and whose season is the turn from late spring into early summer. Xun belongs to the Wood phase, not to Fire, so on this bearing the two systems assign incompatible elements. Neither is wrong within its own scheme, and the disagreement is a reminder that these are separate cosmologies rather than regional dialects of one.

The Greek wind rose named this quarter for Eurus, and the Tower of the Winds in Athens carries a figure for it among its eight sides. That building is the clearest surviving evidence that an eight-point division of the horizon, complete with personified quarters, was in use in the Mediterranean well before the medieval compass rose reached the same number by a different route.