Ten Gods is a poor translation and I use it anyway, because everyone does. The character rendered as god does not mean a deity. Nothing on the list is watching over you or working against you. They are ten names for relationships, in roughly the same register as uncle, cousin, mother-in-law.
The English renderings do not help. Seven Killings, Hurting Officer, Rob Wealth. Read as a list it sounds like a cast of villains, and people arrive at a consultation already worried about which ones they have.
You need a “me” first
The stem on top of the day pillar stands for the person whose chart it is. That is the day master. The Ten Gods come from taking each of the other seven characters, comparing it against the day master, and naming the relationship. Branches cannot be compared directly, so the hidden stems inside them get unpacked first.
Change the day master and every label changes with it. Geng metal has no personality of its own. In a Jia wood chart it is Seven Killings; in a Wu earth chart the same character is Eating God.
Five relations, each split in two
Between five phases only five things can happen: same as me, what I produce, what I control, what controls me, what produces me. If the day master is wood, then wood is same-as-me, fire is what I produce, earth is what I control, metal controls me, water produces me.
Too coarse to use, because it cannot distinguish what yang metal does to yang wood from what yin metal does to it. The distinction is polarity. Yin meeting yin, or yang meeting yang, is two like things repelling and the force runs straight through with no give. Yin meeting yang has a hard side and a soft side, room to negotiate, which the old books call having feeling. Each relation splits accordingly, five by two, ten.
| Relation to the day master | Same polarity | Opposite polarity |
|---|---|---|
| Same as me | Friend 比肩 | Rob Wealth 劫财 |
| What I produce | Eating God 食神 | Hurting Officer 伤官 |
| What I control | Indirect Wealth 偏财 | Direct Wealth 正财 |
| What controls me | Seven Killings 七杀 | Direct Officer 正官 |
| What produces me | Indirect Resource 偏印 | Direct Resource 正印 |
Only three pairs use the direct and indirect wording: Wealth, Officer, Resource. Seven Killings is Indirect Officer under a louder name. The other four got separate names, which makes them look like a different system. The split is identical. Naming has never been consistent in this tradition, and the loudest name of the lot rewards a closer look.
The seven is a count rather than an adjective, which defuses most of the alarm. The stems run Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui. Start at your own day master and the seventh along is always the one that controls you at matching polarity. Jia to Geng is seven, yang metal cutting yang wood. Yi to Xin is seven as well. The killing is decoration, added to the count after the fact.
Where the vocabulary came from
A digression, since it has little to do with reading a chart. The vocabulary is usually said to come from the imperial civil service. Officer is a post in government, Resource is the seal that comes with the post, Wealth is tax revenue, the eating in Eating God is the stipend attached to office, and the killing in Seven Killings is judicial execution. When the old texts talk about Officer and Resource producing each other, the picture is a man holding both the appointment and the seal that makes it official.
Three passes over the chart
What is present. A chart rarely carries all ten. Some have no Wealth star anywhere, some have Resource stacked three or four deep, and what is missing or piled up is the first thing to catch. The trap is treating the visible stems as the whole census when a god absent above may be sitting in a branch. A deeply buried stem weighs far less than one standing openly on top. That part gets skipped.
Where it sits. The same god means different things depending on which pillar it lands in. The year pillar covers early life and the generation above. The month pillar covers young adulthood, parents and siblings, and the month branch is also the seasonal command of the chart, where the question of strength gets decided; it is the heaviest single character of the eight. The day branch is the spouse palace, so whatever sits there attaches directly to marriage. The hour pillar covers later years and children. So “he has Hurting Officer” carries almost no information on its own: Hurting Officer in the month command and in the hour pillar are two different situations. Where the age boundaries between pillars fall, schools cut differently, and I do not argue about it. The luck pillars set the real periods; the four-pillar split is a rough sense of direction.
How strong, and what is holding it. Whether a god has a root in the branches, whether anything nearby produces it, whether anything presses on it. That decides whether it is a force that does something or a name hanging on the page. Plenty of charts have a god that looks present and is pinned down by its neighbour, and plenty have one in the month command that outweighs three of anything else.
About the family correspondences I should be straight. Direct Wealth as wife, Indirect Wealth as father, Direct Officer as husband in a woman’s chart, Officer and Killings as children in a man’s: that mapping was fitted to a household with one wife plus concubines, a patriline, many children. Households in Sydney do not look like that. I hold this layer more loosely than the books do and have no clean rule for how much more loosely. It comes out chart by chart.
The mistake almost everyone makes first
Reading the name as the judgement.
Seven Killings sounds alarming and Hurting Officer is not much better, so the eye goes to those two and stops. Correcting it takes more consultation time than anything else in the introductory material.
Seven Killings is the force that presses down: constraint, deadline, responsibility that cannot be handed off, authority not interested in your opinion. Whether that is a burden depends on whether the day master can carry it. Weak day master with nothing countering it, and a person tends to live braced. That is a description of temperament, not of health. Anything to do with the body goes to a doctor; a chart does not diagnose. Strong day master, or Eating God set against the Seven Killings, and the same force is why he can take on hard work without coming apart. The name does not say which.
Hurting Officer works the same way. It is the outward push: wanting to say the thing, make the thing, do it his own way, with little patience for being told how. Paired with Resource it gets reined in; paired with Wealth what it produces can be sold. It works against Direct Officer by definition, which is why the old texts are unkind about it, and unkindest in the sections on women’s charts. Those passages have a period attached to them and they read badly now.
The reverse holds too. Direct Officer, Direct Resource and Direct Wealth all have respectable names and all become oppressive in excess. Too much Resource and a person prepares indefinitely without starting. Heavy Officer against a weak day master is a life spent being pushed along by obligations.
Hemispheres do not reach this layer
The Ten Gods do not care which side of the equator you are on. They come out of relations between stems, and that arithmetic is identical in Sydney and in Beijing. Hemisphere enters one layer down, where seasonal strength is counted against the month command. My position there is that the heavenly stars do not move while the earthly trigrams do, and that the solar terms keep their names while swapping in use. How that carries onto strength and weakness in a Bazi chart is messier than the Feng Shui case, and I am still working through it.
What you have at the end of it
An inventory of forces. What this person carries, which stretch of life and which relationship each attaches to, what has roots and what is pinned. None of it has been weighed against anything yet, which is the next article.
Which forces the person needs and which are surplus belongs to the favourable and unfavourable elements, which means settling the strength of the day master first, then reading the luck cycles over the top.
This is the layer I go slowest on when I take someone through their own chart. Everything said later is built on it, and if it stays vague none of the rest holds.