[UA] N.E.S.W.

[Jess Nevins]

mrteapot wrote:

> >         IIRC, "gone west" is WWI era British pilot slang
> > for dead.  I don't know precisely what it means - but you
> > gotta figure it had something to do with Germany being
> > East of them.
>
> Actually, West being connected with death shows up fairly
> universally in mythology, IIRC.  In Egypt, the land of the
> dead was the Western Lands, and in China they'd say someone
> important went west instead of dying.  In the Oddyssey,
> Homer places the land of the dead to the west, etc.  A
> leading theory connects the symbolic daily death of the sun
> (in a sunset) with normal people's deaths.

Wasn't Avalon in the West in the Arthurian myths?

jess


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