Five kinds of energy
The Five Elements are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. In a Saju chart each of the eight characters belongs to one of them, and how many of each there are sets the base colour of the chart. They are not literal substances. They are five ways of describing a kind of energy, and SajuPath explains each in everyday terms.
What each element stands for
- Wood is the energy of learning new things and growing. It rises like spring.
- Fire is the energy of showing and expressing. It blazes outward like summer.
- Earth is the energy of grounding and holding steady. It sits at the centre and joins one season to the next.
- Metal is the energy of sorting things out and seeing them through. It gathers and refines like autumn.
- Water is the energy of thinking things through. It gathers inward and seeps in like winter.
They feed each other and hold each other in check
The five are connected in two cycles. In the generating cycle (Sang-saeng), Wood feeds Fire, Fire feeds Earth, Earth feeds Metal, Metal feeds Water and Water feeds Wood, which closes the circle. In the controlling cycle (Sang-geuk), Wood holds Earth, Earth holds Water, Water holds Fire, Fire holds Metal and Metal holds Wood.
Being held in check is not a bad thing here. It is how the elements keep one another in balance, the way a river is shaped by its banks. A chart is read for how well these two cycles are being passed around, not for whether any single element is good or bad.
How to count them in your own chart
Take the eight characters in the table and turn each one into its element. Elements that appear many times are the ones whose energy you use a lot; an element that does not appear at all is a place where it can help to give that energy a little attention on purpose. None of this is a verdict. It is a clue about your temperament. The free calculator draws the five counts as a pentagon under the table, so you can see the shape of your chart in a moment.
In everyday terms
A chart with a lot of Wood tends to be drawn toward learning and starting new things, while a chart with a lot of Fire finds showing and expressing natural. Plenty of Earth puts energy into staying put and building steadily, plenty of Metal into sorting and finishing, and plenty of Water into thinking deeply and soaking things in. These are only tendencies, and everyone can use all five. If an element is thin in your chart, treat that as a prompt to use that kind of energy a little more consciously, nothing more.
The elements are also tied to the seasons: Wood to spring, Fire to summer, Metal to autumn and Water to winter, with Earth holding the turn between each. That is why the month branch, the season of your birth month, carries so much weight in a reading.