East

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

East is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points, and the opposite of west, and is the part of the horizon from which the sun rises. East is the direction in which the earth rotates about its axis, and therefore from which the sun rises at the equinox.

The word east comes from an old Proto-Indo-European word for dawn, hence the Greek eōs and the Germanic Eostre, a goddess of dawn, who might also have had rulership over the east. In Gaelic the word for east is airt, which is a term referring also to the system of the airts, whereby some associate east with the colour red and the dawn (as in the red morning sky that presages a "shepherd's warning" in the old weather rhyme).