The Ten Gods (Sip-shin) — A Primer on Saju's Energy Map

The Ten Gods are ten archetypal relationships between you and every other element in your chart, measured against a single reference point called the Day Master. They are categories of energy, not specific objects or events.

Where modern personality frameworks describe a person through traits like extraversion or openness, Saju describes a person through how their core self (the Day Master) relates to ten patterns of action, output, support, and structure.

The same ten patterns are used worldwide in Saju, BaZi, and Four Pillars practice — the names change across languages, but the underlying map is one and the same.

The Day Master is the Heavenly Stem of the day pillar in your Four Pillars chart. Every other stem and branch in your chart is read in relation to it. If your Day Master is the element Wood, then the other nine stems are read as 'how Wood relates to Fire,' 'how Wood relates to Metal,' and so on.

This is why the Ten Gods are personal. The same stem can play a completely different role for two different people depending on what their Day Master is. A reading that says 'your Sik-shin is strong' is always a statement about your Day Master's relationship to the rest of the chart.

The ten archetypes pair up into five categories of two — same-polarity and opposite-polarity versions of the same relationship. The categories are: Bi-gyeon (peer of same polarity) and Geop-jae (peer of opposite polarity), Sik-shin (steady creative output) and Sang-gwan (volatile creative output), Jeong-jae (committed wealth) and Pyeon-jae (flexible wealth), Jeong-gwan (rule-bound authority) and Pyeon-gwan (raw authority), and Jeong-in (steady support) and Pyeon-in (irregular support).

Same-polarity and opposite-polarity versions are not better or worse than each other — they describe different temperatures of the same underlying energy. Sik-shin and Sang-gwan both describe creative output, but Sik-shin tends to favor steady, expertise-based production while Sang-gwan tends to favor breakthrough, rule-breaking production.

In practice, every chart contains all ten in some form. The reading focuses on which ones are most active, which ones are missing, and how they interact through the timing layer — Major Luck cycles and annual flows.

A reading typically begins by identifying which Ten Gods are structurally strong in the natal chart and which are activated in the current timing layer. A person born with strong Pyeon-jae but currently moving through a Sik-shin period reads differently from a person born with strong Sik-shin who is currently in a Pyeon-jae period.

Modern Saju practice avoids assigning the Ten Gods to fixed life events. 'Sik-shin equals independent business' is the kind of shortcut that historical sources do not actually support. The careful reading is: Sik-shin describes a quality of output, and how that quality lands depends on the rest of the chart and the timing.

When CODIX says, 'Sik-shin is activated through your Day Master this period,' it means the steady-output archetype is currently emphasized in your chart, computed from your Day Master against the current cycle's stems. It does not mean a specific job or income event.

The same response will then check whether Western astrology and Sidereal astrology are pointing in the same direction. Where the three converge, the message is stronger. Where the Ten Gods say one thing and the planetary transits say another, both signals are kept and described as a tension — which is often where the most useful question lives.