Which ghost power
lives in your saju? 🏮

The result screen is made of two kinds of text. The True form, Powers, Weakness, extra note and Original text fields carry only what appears in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, the National Institute of Korean Language’s Standard Korean Language Dictionary, old texts such as the Jibong yuseol, the Yeolha ilgi, the Dongguk sesigi and the Shan Hai Jing, and the field recordings of the Grand Compendium of Korean Oral Literature, with a source on every line. Stories we could not trace to a source were left out, however often they turn up online.

The why we paired them and just for fun fields, on the other hand, are this test’s own interpretation. No old book says “Gap Wood means dokkaebi.” The rule here is to read your day master through the verses on the heavenly stems in the Di Tian Sui (滴天髓), a classic of Four Pillars astrology, and to pick a ghost whose folklore shares a material with that verse — wood, fire, earth, metal or water. The result screen labels it that way too.

Your birth date goes through the manse-ryeok to produce the eight characters of your saju (six if you don’t know your birth time), and each character counts toward one of the five elements. There is no weighting: one character, one vote.

Two special conditions come first. If one energy makes up 60% or more of the total (5 of 8 characters, or 4 of 6), you are the fixated type — Yagwanggwi. If all five energies are present and none has more than two characters, you are the balanced type — Gumiho. Otherwise your day master decides. The day master is the upper character of your birth day, the seat that stands for “you” in Four Pillars astrology.

The big number on the result screen is the share of your characters held by your ghost’s energy (your day master’s element, or the most common energy for the fixated and balanced types). We call it “ghost power” because it sounds good, but it is simply the counted share of characters.

For each heavenly stem, the table gives the opening phrase of its verse in the Di Tian Sui’s chapter on the stems and the phrase used for the pairing, next to the ghost whose folklore features the same material. The folklore in the right-hand column appears on the result screen with its sources.

The wording of the Di Tian Sui differs slightly between editions. Gye Water’s 得龍而運 appears as 得龍而潤 in some editions; either way, the verse has a dragon (龍) in it.

The Kkachi Library dictionary of Korean yokai and ghosts (in Korean) has 24 entries. We first picked the ones whose folklore clearly features wood, fire, earth, metal or water, then gave the fixated and balanced types the two whose behavior matches those conditions: the yagwanggwi, which stays up all night counting one thing, and the gumiho, which can turn into anything.

Vengeful spirits such as the cheonyeo gwisin (maiden ghost) and the mongdal gwisin (bachelor ghost) were left out this time, because nothing in their folklore connects them to the five elements. Not inventing reasons to force a fit is the rule of this test.

It is the real distribution from computing every case: each of the 19,359 days from 1 January 1960 to 31 December 2012, multiplied by 13 birth-time options (unknown plus the 12 earthly-branch hours), for 251,667 combinations. The ten types decided by the day master each come out evenly at a little over 8%, the balanced type (Gumiho) at 11.9%, and the fixated type (Yagwanggwi) at 6.3%.

The fixated type turns up more often when the birth time is unknown, because only four of six characters need to match (9.3% with the time unknown, 6.1% with a time entered). The balanced type, on the other hand, turns up slightly more often when you enter a time (10.9% → 12.0%).

There are no random numbers anywhere in the calculation. The table of solar-term transition times is fixed inside the page, and so are the way the elements are counted and the two conditions. Enter the same birth date and time and you get the same ghost, whenever and on whatever device you try.

My birthday is on the lunar calendar — can I enter it as is?

No. Input is solar, meaning the Gregorian calendar. If you only know your lunar birthday, convert it to a solar date with the lunar–solar converter (in Korean) first, then enter that.

Does not knowing my birth time change the result?

It can. Without a time, the two characters of the hour pillar drop out and six characters are counted. Your day master stays the same, so you will usually get the same ghost — but if that tips you into or out of the fixated or balanced condition, the result changes.

My result is different from other manse-ryeok calculators

This test calculates with a single standard and no options. Birth time is taken only as one of the 12 two-hour earthly-branch periods, with the middle of each period standing in for it, and there is no 30-minute standard-time correction and no separate handling of the late-night (yajasi) hour. Years and months change at the solar-term transition times.

Does the result link contain my birth date?

No. The only values in a share link are your day master’s number, the number of characters for each of the five energies, and whether six or eight characters were counted. Your birth date and birth time cannot be recovered from these values.

My ghost is on the scary side, and I’m a little hurt

We only carried over what the folklore says; the result is not a verdict on your character. The scarier the ghost, the more you should read its weakness first. People in old Korea believed ghosts could be beaten not by strength but by wit.

This test is for entertainment. The manse-ryeok part is a real calculation running on actual solar-term data, and the ghost side carries only folklore with sources. But joining the two is simply this test’s rule of play; neither Four Pillars astrology nor Korean folk tradition says “this chart means this ghost.”

If the ghost stories have made you curious, read the entries in the yokai and ghost dictionary (in Korean). You can look up your own eight characters with the manse-ryeok tool (in Korean).

These are all the sources cited on the result screen. For the Korean page, old texts were rendered by checking the original against translations, and where editions differ the text says so. This English page was translated from the Korean page by AI (Claude); source titles are given in English, while the sources themselves are in Korean or Classical Chinese.

1. Di Tian Sui (滴天髓), chapter on the heavenly stems — wording varies between editions — collated from the 『祕授命理須知滴天髓』 (by Jing Tu, annotated by Liu Ji) and the edition compiled by Chen Zhilin (陳之遴)
2. Yi Su-gwang, Jibong yuseol (1614) — the entry on gangcheol: 强鐵去處 雖秋如春 … 草木禾稼悉皆枯損
3. Park Ji-won, Yeolha ilgi, “Seonggyeong japji,” Sangnu pildam — the passage 罡鐵去處 秋亦爲春
4. Yu Deuk-gong, Gyeongdo japji, seasonal customs, New Year’s Day (late 18th century) — the passage on the yagwang
5. Hong Seok-mo, Dongguk sesigi, first month, New Year’s Day (1849) — the passage on the yagwang (夜光)
6. Shan Hai Jing, Classic of the Southern Mountains, Qingqiu Mountain
7. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Dokkaebi” (in Korean)
8. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Dokkaebi tales” (in Korean)
9. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Wild ginseng tales” (in Korean)
10. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Wild ginseng and the isimi” (in Korean)
11. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Dragon” (in Korean)
12. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Jeoseung saja” (in Korean)
13. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Tales of lengthened life” (in Korean)
14. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Sajado (messenger paintings)” (in Korean)
15. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Eop” (in Korean)
16. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Household god worship” (in Korean)
17. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “The Bulgasari tale” (in Korean)
18. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Choe Go-un jeon” (in Korean)
19. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Neokgeonjigi-gut” (in Korean)
20. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Driving away the yagwang” (in Korean)
21. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “Fox” (in Korean)
22. Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, “The fox bead tale” (in Korean)
23. National Institute of Korean Language, Standard Korean Language Dictionary, “mulgwishin” (in Korean)
24. National Folk Museum of Korea, Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, “Eop” (in Korean)
25. National Institute of Korean History, Uri Yeoksa Net, History of Korean Culture vol. 33 (in Korean)
26. Grand Compendium of Korean Oral Literature, “The story of Choe Go-un” (Geochang, South Gyeongsang, recorded 1980) (in Korean)
27. Hankook Ilbo, “Driving away the kkwangcheori” (10 November 2015) (in Korean)