Eating God

Meaning

The Eating God is a stem of the phase the Day Master produces, with the same polarity: Bing for a Jia Day Master, since Wood feeds Fire; Geng for a Wu, since Earth bears Metal. It belongs to output, the family of what the self brings forth, its words, its work, its craft, and of the two output gods it is the easy one, expression that flows without strain.

Its name, shíshén, is “the eating god”, the god of food, and the tradition gives it the qualities of a good table: enjoyment, generosity, an unhurried pleasure in making and sharing. Ulune reads it as the Zi Ping school’s consensus does: talent expressed with ease, enjoyment, creativity, and a generous, relaxed way of giving. Its caution is the other side of ease: with much of it and little else, pleasure can stand in for effort, and the classics like it best with a purpose to serve.

Output draws on the Day Master, as a fire draws on its wood. A strong Day Master is helped by the Eating God, which gives its strength an outlet; a weak one may find it tiring, and needs its own phase and its resource first.

In practice

• On the board: for a Jia Day Master, a Bing stem among the pillars, or the Bing hidden in Yin and in Si.
• Its reading: shown, talent that flows easily, a taste for the good things of life, and a generous, relaxed way of sharing what you make; only in the branches, gifts that show in private, pleasures and talents kept for those close to you; absent, ease and enjoyment may need room to be made for them, and the tradition suggests leisure as a skill to practise.
• Strength and balance: as output, the Eating God draws on the Day Master; when the Day Master is strong, output is among the phases that bring balance.
• The structure: when the month’s structure comes from its Eating God, revealed among the stems or as the month’s main qi, Ulune names the Eating God structure (食神格).
• Luck pillars and years: a decade of the Eating God is one of expression and ease, of talents that flow, of teaching and making; a year, one to create, to enjoy and to share what you make.
• Two people: when the other’s Day Master is your Eating God, your Day Master produces theirs: you inspire and feed, they take the idea further.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam it keeps its name: shokujin in Shichū Suimei, siksin in Korean saju, thực thần in Vietnamese.
• In Western astrology its themes belong to the fifth house, of play, pleasure and what one creates, and to Venus’s ease: the same joys, read by a house and a planet rather than by a relation of phases.

Origin and history

The Song dynasty Yuanhai Ziping gives the Eating God its place among the ten, and the books after it count it among the most welcome. Two of its relations made its name. It produces Wealth, the phase the Day Master controls, so that ease turns into livelihood: the classics’ “the Eating God produces wealth”. And it controls Seven Killings, the pressure that bears on the self, as Fire tempers Metal for a Wood Day Master: “the Eating God controls the Killings” is one of the pairings the books praise most, talent taming strain.

The Ziping Zhenquan, under the Qing, counts the Eating God among the four favourable gods, to be supported and protected, and names what it fears: the Indirect Resource, which controls it, an image the books call “the owl snatching the food”. The Di Tian Sui reminds its readers that even the gentlest god is read by the whole chart.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune names a stem the Eating God when its phase is one step from the Day Master’s along the generating cycle, Wood to Fire, Fire to Earth, Earth to Metal, Metal to Water, Water to Wood, and their polarities agree. It looks among the stems of the year, the month and the hour and among the hidden stems of the branches with their weights, counts the Eating God shown and hidden, and reads it as shown, hidden or absent. Output draws on the Day Master in the strength tests, and the month gives the Eating God structure when the Eating God is the first of the month branch’s hidden stems, peers aside, to show among the stems, or, if none shows, the first of them.

Correspondences