The ten gods 十神: what everything else in your chart is to you

There are five elements, so there are exactly five things another character can be to your day master. No sixth position exists, and the list is closed by arithmetic rather than by tradition:

These five are the labels your life chart already prints against each pillar and each scored year. Traditional practice goes one step further, and the step is the whole subject.

Every heavenly stem is either yang or yin. When two characters meet, the tradition holds that matching polarity repels and opposing polarity attracts, exactly as two magnets do, and that the relation between them behaves accordingly.

Matched polarity gives an interaction with nothing between the two parties to soften it: blunt, forceful, uneven, and hard to bind into an arrangement. Opposing polarity gives one that binds and behaves itself. The classical names record the difference honestly. The discipline relation met at matching polarity is 七杀, seven killings. The identical relation met at opposing polarity is 正官, the direct officer, and the word 正 running through half these names means proper, upright, on the level.

Five relations, two polarities, ten gods. That is the entire derivation, and everything below follows from it.

Find your day master down the left, then read across to any stem you want to identify. All hundred cells are computed from the same engine that runs the calculator, so this table and your chart cannot disagree.

The same public chart used elsewhere on this site: Elon Musk, born June 28, 1971. Birth time unpublished, so this is an honest three-pillar chart and the hour is simply absent rather than guessed. His day master is Jia Wood, so every other stem is labeled against that.

Two things are worth noticing, and neither is a prediction. The month stem is the day master's own element at its own polarity, which is 比肩, and a Peer sitting in the month is the classical picture of someone who competes in the arena they were raised in. The year stem is Metal against Wood at matching polarity, which is 七杀, the harshest label in the set and the one the tradition associates with adversarial pressure and with people who work best when something is coming for them.

Whether those are assets depends entirely on how much support the day master has, which is a separate calculation with a separate answer. This chart scores weak, and a weak day master reads Seven Killings very differently from a strong one. That arithmetic is worked start to finish on the day master page, and every weight it uses is published in the calculation methodology.

A ten-god label is a position, not a verdict. It says what a character does to your day master, and says nothing at all about whether you want that done. The same 伤官 that wrecks one chart is the entire career in another, and the difference is not the god, it is what the chart was short of to begin with.

Readings that hand out fortunes on the strength of a god alone are reading half the system. The classical order is fixed and it is the order this site follows: find the day master, weigh it, then read the gods against that weight. Skip the middle step and the vivid names do all the work, which is how Rob Wealth and Seven Killings came to sound like sentences rather than mechanisms.

This page also follows one school. The day-master method set out in the Yuanhai Ziping is the mainstream, but pattern-school practice weights the same ten gods differently, and charts near the follower structures are read by rules this summary does not cover.