Behold the Pole Star

Several years ago​ at a party I met a man who claimed that he navigated London using a compass. Fed up of following directions on his phone, he had bought a handsome, waterproof instrument and fixed it to the handlebars of his bike. Before setting off he would check the address of his destination and take a bearing; then he would wend his way through street and alley. Doing this had, he claimed, reoriented him in a city made unfamiliar through use. He had discovered a new sense: a spatial awareness that enabled him to read the hidden flows of the metropolis like a Polynesian seafarer following ocean paths otherwise traced only by the wind. He was so persuasive that when I got home from the party I ordered a compass for my own bike. With it, I imagined, I too would become an urban navigator, unbound by convention or app. Instead, I got lost. Repeatedly and hopelessly lost. My compass directed me into cul-de-sacs and down dead ends; it steered me into canals and locked-up parks and the path of oncoming traffic. I was frustrated. I was frequently late. Whatever mystical sense the man at the party had awakened remained dormant in me, and after a few weeks I went back to my phone, chastened and newly obedient.

Nonetheless, the compass retains a sense of romance. It’s pleasingly approximate, twitchy and impulsive. It feels alive in a way that Google Maps does not, partly because it is a natural instrument, in the sense that it operates according to the provisions of nature. Every compass needle on the Earth’s surface is moving in response to the 1367-mile-thick ocean of liquid iron and nickel under our feet that generates the planet’s magnetism. This layer is the outer core, churning away under the similarly thick but solid mantle. Stirred by its own heat and the planet’s spin, it produces huge, helical convection and electric currents, which in turn create magnetic fields aligned roughly with the Earth’s axis of rotation. It turns the planet into a giant bar magnet that tugs and nudges at magnetised matter, including the compass. This phenomenon has long been exploited by Earth’s occupants: organisms across numerous taxa, including bacteria, plants, reptiles and insects, sense geomagnetism and act in response. Some creatures instinctively align their bodies with the Earth’s magnetic field during moments of repose: cattle and deer while grazing and resting, dogs while defecating. Other adaptations are more obviously useful. Magnetite found in the beaks of migratory birds is thought to act like an internal compass, enabling them to sense the strength and alignment of the Earth’s magnetism in the way humans feel the push and direction of the wind. Magnetite has also been found sprinkled throughout the human brain. A study from 2018 found that the mineral is most heavily concentrated in the cerebellum and brainstem, the evolutionarily older regions, though studies claiming that humans also have a sense of magnetoreception remain contentious.

We don’t necessarily need a new sense to take advantage of magnetism: mere curiosity will suffice. Thales of Miletus thought the ability of lodestones – naturally magnetised lumps of mineral – to attract certain metals was evidence that matter could possess a soul. Pliny the Elder recounts a legend in which a shepherd wearing iron-studded shoes is rooted to the spot while rambling over a hillside rich in magnetic ore. (The story takes place in the region of Magnesia, one suggested origin of the word in English.) And around the second century BCE in China, someone thought to carve a lodestone into the shape of a ladle that balances on its bowl, allowing the handle to float in alignment with the planet’s north-south axis. Directions provided by such instruments were first used for divination, astrology and geomancy, ensuring that buildings were constructed in harmony with the Earth’s energy. Then, as the technology was miniaturised, with magnetised iron needles first floated in liquid then balanced on pivots, its potential for use in navigation became clear. Compasses spread across Asia and into Europe by uncertain means. Around 1190 CE, the English poet-abbot Alexander Neckam provided the first written account of the compass in Europe in De naturis rerum. He noted that when sailors

sail over the sea, when in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the Sun, or when the world is wrapped up in the darkness of the shades of night, and they are ignorant to what point of the compass their ship’s course is directed, they touch the magnet with a needle which is whirled round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks direct to the north.

In fact a compass doesn’t actually point north: it aligns with the planet’s north-south magnetic axis (which differs from its geographic axis by a few degrees, with magnetic north wandering around the Arctic Circle at a pace of a few dozen miles a year thanks to the chaotic churn of the outer core). To say that a compass ‘points north’ is mere convention, as made clear by the name given to early Chinese compasses: zhinan, or ‘a thing that points south’. This is where our understanding of the four cardinal directions as fixed or natural concepts begins to unravel; where, as Jerry Brotton writes in his history of the compass, we encounter the paradox of directions that ‘appear to be real and natural’ yet are ‘invented and cultural’ – rooted more in identity, ideology and theology than in geography.

Well, to some degree. The Earth’s magnetic field isn’t the only aspect of cardinality that could be said to have natural origins. The notion of four principal directions is widespread (though not universal) and possibly originates in the egocentric co-ordinates of the human body: front, back, left and right. Brotton suggests that four, as the smallest composite number (a number divisible by a number that is neither one nor itself), has a sense of completeness; a totality reflected in the geometry of the square and the cross, each defined by four points, which perhaps appealed to early mapmakers. Whatever the explanation, the notion of four principal directions is ancient. Naram-Sin, ruler of the Akkadian dynasty in the 23rd century BCE, provides the first record by claiming the title ‘King of the Four Corners of the World’. His Akkadian peers also left us the world’s oldest map with four cardinal directions, the Gasur or Nuzi map, though its labels refer not to points but to quadrants, derived from the four different winds that blew into Mesopotamia. There’s the north-eastern ‘mountain’ wind and south-western ‘desert’ wind; the cool and regular north-western wind, and the wet and unpredictable south-eastern ‘demon’ wind. As is often the case with cardinality, directions are laden with meanings that meld the natural and the cultural, the meteorological and ethnographic. The name of the south-western desert wind, IM-mart-tu, is derived from the name of the nomadic Amurru people of modern-day Syria and Palestine, who blew in with the weather, while the north-western wind, named IM-mir, important for farmers because of its cooling properties, became associated with Akkadian notions of ‘fertility, renewal, prosperity and temperance’. The Akkadians even supply perhaps the first instance of stereotyping the south as a source of volatility. ‘Every culture has its southerners,’ Susan Sontag wrote, ‘people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses.’ In Mesopotamia this was not an identity but a description of the unpredictable south-eastern ‘demon’ winds that blew in with wet weather from the Persian Gulf.

Another directional scheme with a claim to innateness is the Earth’s east-west axis: the route tracking the diurnal passage of the Sun. It has symbolised the journey of birth, death and renewal in numerous ancient cultures. Sun worship and a reverence for the eastern horizon was widespread for millennia, but such tendencies became problematic with the arrival of Judaism and Christianity. As Brotton notes, ‘the theology of monotheism meant that the east soon became caught in a shifting language game between condemning the direction of Sun worship as negative, while defining its role in Creation as positive.’ The Book of Ezekiel, for example, decries the idolatry of those who worship ‘with their backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the east’, yet Genesis locates Eden in the east, and it’s from the east that Adam and Eve must journey after the Fall. The Gospel of Matthew tells the faithful they should look to the east for the second coming: ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.’ Such symbology combines the geographic and the temporal: the daily journey of the Sun is taken to mimic not only the brief span of human lives but the grand Christian timeline of judgment and redemption, the clock that goes round just once.

This cardinal preference came to be enshrined in architecture. Early Christian churches were built so that the altar, congregation and priest faced ad orientem (literally, towards sunrise), a decision that was eventually a focus of theological controversy. During the Reformation, the Church of England placed altars in the north of the church or had the priest stand at the north end of the communion table instead of facing east. In the 19th century, the Oxford Movement began to worship ad orientem once more as part of a broader effort to reclaim the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism. The issue even reached Parliament, Brotton notes, when ad orientem services were banned by the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 along with other elements derided as ‘ritualism’. (The Act was repealed in 1965.) Islam also sought to distinguish itself from Sun worship by establishing the qibla: the direction in which Muslims must pray, codified in 623 CE as the location of the Kaaba in Mecca. But for Catholics the opportunity to unite faith and cosmology is too powerful. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in 2000, ‘praying towards the east is a tradition that goes back to the beginning. Moreover, it is a fundamental expression of the Christian synthesis of cosmos and history.’

The devotional power of the rising Sun made east the prime direction for early mapmakers, and it remained so into the medieval period. The most significant maps of this era were mappae mundi like the Ebstorf Map (destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War), the Sawley map (the oldest surviving example made in England) and the Hereford Mappa Mundi (drafted around 1300 CE). These maps were more religious than topographical, surveying not only space but time. They are oriented with east at the top, marked as the location of the Garden of Eden, from which the Christian story flows downwards like grains in an hourglass, coming to a focus at the map’s centre, the city of Jerusalem, before spreading out once more to the pious inheritors of the Gospel in Europe. This temporal symbolism has proved irresistible for many. ‘The History of the World travels from East to West,’ Hegel wrote, ‘for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.’ Hegel’s mythology of the east as ‘the childhood of History’ ‘infantilised whole swathes of the Earth and its people’, Brotton writes, ‘and justified the colonisation and enslavement of much of Africa, Asia and the Americas’. It was these ideas to which Edward Said was responding with his reconception of the east in Orientalism (1978) as the ‘source of [Europe’s] civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’. Without the east, how would the west define itself?

But the symbolism of direction is infinitely flexible: for every seemingly immutable association there is an opposite interpretation. As the endpoint of the Sun’s daily journey, the west is just as easily associated with diminishment and death as fulfilment (ancient Egyptians sometimes referred to the dead as ‘westerners’ for this reason). After the slaughter and futility of the First World War, Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West, declaring that its soil was ‘metaphysically exhausted’, and that it would fall into Caesarism and then collapse. Spengler’s work has been criticised for its fetishism of blood and fate, but its popularity shows the potency of simple myths that set out a direction for the world and its peoples.

Given​ the power of the east-west axis, it may seem surprising that the eastward orientation of the world was ever displaced, yet it was, on maps at least. Brotton identifies a number of reasons north became primus inter pares of the four cardinal directions. It starts with Greco-Roman culture, in particular the cartography of the Alexandrian scholar Ptolemy, who knew the world was a globe and thought the best way to project it was as a grid. On such a map, the vertical lines of longitude converge naturally at two poles (the choice to put north on top seems to have been purely a matter of custom). Like the Akkadians before them, the Greeks organised cardinality by meteorology not magnetism, usually identifying either eight or twelve cardinal directions based on prevailing winds, with the north wind, boreas, given precedence. In the northern hemisphere, Polaris, the North Star, also aided navigation before compasses. For Anglo-Saxon navigators, Polaris was known as the scip-steorra, or ship-star, and became associated with the Virgin Mary in her role as mankind’s guide in the journey towards Christ – she was Stella Maris, ‘Star of the Sea’. ‘Behold the Pole Star!’ Neckam wrote. ‘The sailor at night directs his course by it, for it stands motionless at the fixed hinge of the turning sky – and Mary is like the Pole Star.’ As the compass became crucial for trade, warfare and exploration, these antecedents led pilots and mapmakers to privilege north over south, and this orientation was cemented from the medieval period onwards by European colonisation and global trade.

Etymologically, the English terms for north, east, south and west come from the work of the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne (748-814), who standardised the terms from Proto-Indo-European roots. As Brotton glosses it, we have nord, north, from the PIE nórto-s, meaning ‘lower’ or ‘left’ – in relation to one’s direction when facing the rising Sun. Est for east comes from austo-s, meaning ‘to shine’, with a particular reference to the light of dawn. Sund, or south, comes from sú-n-to-s, referring to the Sun itself, in particular its position at midday in the northern hemisphere – due south. And oëst, west, may originate from the PIE uestos, ‘with its various meanings of the evening including red (as in the setting Sun)’, or the Greek hesperos for ‘evening’ or ‘evening star’. Again, cosmology guides cardinality.

Do the dense layers of meaning associated with each cardinal direction persist in the modern age? Brotton ends his survey by noting the year the reign of the compass finally expired: 2008, which saw the launch of the iPhone and the creation of the blue dot, the constant marker in map apps by which we now orient ourselves. ‘In this our digitised century,’ Brotton writes, ‘there are now five directions – north, south, east, west, and the online blue dot: “You”.’ Paper maps have given way to the dot, which is now ‘pre-eminent, superseding compass directions which, for many, become irrelevant. Eyes glued to that jerky little blue ball, we spend less and less travel time observing the physical terrain through which we move.’ There is an implication of loss: of the spatial reasoning fundamental to cognition, of awareness and attention to the world around us. Yet Brotton is more sanguine about the loss than some who have written on the subject: he argues that while cardinal directions were initially derived from cosmology and geomagnetism, their practical application has been eclipsed by their ideological freight. The association of north, south, east and west with political and cultural values, and their connection to shifting identities, mean that our maps transcended mere geography long ago.