Jerry Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is a regular broadcaster and critic, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 12 Maps.
What’s the big idea?
The four cardinal directions are immutable, but the way in which humans present them visually and use them as political and cultural symbols has been highly variable over the centuries. What we place at the top of a compass and how we draw maps is debatable, but the value of using our minds to practice navigation—especially as we rely on technology—is worth preserving.
Below, Jerry shares five key insights from his new book, Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction. Listen to the audio version—read by Jerry himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The caution sticker on directional stereotypes.
The East: it’s where the sun rises. Throughout human history, the East has been associated with birth, beginnings, light, and warmth. It’s probably the first direction humanity has understood, which gives it sacredness over all other directions. Ancient polytheistic societies like the Incas and Egyptians worshipped the sun, and by extension, the East, as the origins of life.
Judeo-Christian belief took up the reverence for the East, but instead of celebrating it as the place where the sun rose, they worshipped it as the location of Creation. In the Old Testament the Garden of Eden is located in the east; the Resurrection will come from the east. In Hebrew, mizrah means east, which is the direction Jews west of Israel face during prayer. Christian churches are oriented to the east, and medieval Christian maps show east at the top, Jerusalem at the center, and west at the bottom.
Latin-speaking Christians called east by the word orient, meaning the sun rising. Over the subsequent centuries, Europe created the idea of the Orient as a place to its east—which is why we talk about the Middle East and the Far East today. Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote a book called Orientalism, explaining how the West imagined this place called the Orient. Take care when labeling people and places according to a direction on a compass. “Orientals” are just as much a stereotype as “northerners”—and I should know, I come from the north of England!
2. South started at the top of the compass.
The South: you can always identify it at noon, because that’s when the sun is due south (if you’re in the northern hemisphere). When the Chinese first invented the compass in the second century BCE, their needles pointed south, not north! The Chinese word for compass can even be translated as the south that points north. It was only centuries later, when the compass reached Europe, that Christian sailors put the needle pointing north.
“When the Chinese first invented the compass in the second century BCE, their needles pointed south.”
South would do just as well as north at the top of world maps. The Australian Stuart McArthur’s 1979 map, called “McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World,” puts south at the top. Nearly all classical Islamic maps put south at the top because the people that first converted to Islam in the late 7th century lived north of Mecca, so they oriented themselves—and their maps—with Mecca at the top. Today, the South is having a resurgence. We now talk about the Global South, a term first used in 1969 to describe many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Maybe the global future lies ‘down south.’
3. The mystery of placing North at the top.
The North: the most complicated of all four directions. Why is it now at the top of nearly all world maps? It’s a question that map historians have never properly answered. Most ancient societies saw the North as dark, bleak, and cold. In Hebrew, it means hidden, and it is often described as a negative place in the Old Testament: in Jeremiah, “Evil appeareth out of the North.” Some Christian churches even contain a north-facing Devil’s Door to allow the devil to escape.
I argue that the change that precipitated the North’s triumph was navigation. In 1569, the Flemish mapmaker Gerard Mercator invented a new world map projection. It was designed to allow navigators to sail east to west, either side of the equator, by drawing a straight line of bearing. To do this, Mercator deliberately lengthened the parallels on his map the closer they got to the poles. As a result, he projected the poles to infinity. He put North at the top because he’d worked out that no pilot or merchant could or should go there—the North Pole is treacherous! The North triumphed by accident—because nobody wanted to go there. The North has endured ever since. When NASA first saw the famous “Blue Marble” photo taken by the astronauts on Apollo 17 in December 1972, they turned the image upside down to show north at the top.
4. The geopolitical side of a compass.
The West: the most misunderstood of all four directions. It’s where the day ends, the sun sets, and night falls. Ancient societies associated it with death and the underworld. It is the direction of Atlantis, Elysium, Avalon, and the Undying Lands in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. No societies ever put West at the top of their world maps.
“More than any other direction, the West is associated with a geopolitical concept.”
This seems odd considering our political concept of the West as at the forefront of the modern world. More than any other direction, the West is associated with a geopolitical concept: we often think of Europe and North America when we speak of the Western World. I think of myself as a Westerner when I’m abroad (though I say I’m a northerner when I’m in the UK). The political concept of the West is quite recent: it is a 19th-century idea. From the beginning, people wrote about the West, and they talked about how it’s in decline. The German thinker Oswald Spengler wrote his The Decline of the West in 1922, which continues to influence philosophers and politicians. But in German, untergang literally means going under or downfall, and abendland translates to west or evening land. So, Spengler almost unconsciously drew on age-old ideas about the West as a place of sunset, death, and darkness.
5. The final direction is you—and your blue dot.
If there were a fifth direction, I would suggest it is you—or rather, the blue dot on the smartphone. Between 2007 and 2008, Apple released iPhones that included Wi-Fi-enabled map applications. It led to the “blue dot” that navigated users to their current “home” location. It’s often said we are the last generation to remember what it means to get lost. In following the blue dot, are we becoming disconnected or disoriented from the world around us?
Some neuroscientists believe that surrendering our ability to navigate the space around us could reduce our mental faculties, or at least that part of the brain driving spatial cognition. Studies have identified place cells, neurons in and around the hippocampus (the site of spatial learning and memory). There is evidence that the hippocampus can shrink if we don’t exercise it by using our senses to navigate—and remember—routes.
To avoid our modern feelings of disorientation, look at the sun, feel the wind on your face, and work out east from west, north from south. Turn off your phone, go for a walk, and get lost. Who knows what you might find?
To listen to the audio version read by author Jerry Brotton, download the Next Big Idea App today:
