What Are Sinsal?

You ran a free reading and got back a red list of ominous-sounding star names. Then you tried another site with the same birth date, and the count came out different.

Both of those have an explanation. This article asks one question: why does one site say your chart holds six of these stars while another says three, for the very same birth data? Once you know the answer, you stop counting names and start asking which one to read first.

The short answer: sinsal are labels, not the chart itself

The word sinsal (神殺) joins sin (神), a relationship that brings good things, and sal (殺), one that strikes against something. The Korean Wikipedia entry defines sinsal as a special relationship between two stems or branches — and then immediately adds that, being special, it sits somewhat apart from the theory of the four pillars itself.

That single sentence places sinsal precisely. The framework of a reading is the generation and control of the five elements; sinsal are labels fastened onto that framework. If the eight characters themselves are unfamiliar, start with what saju is and get the four pillars straight first.

Labels are genuinely useful. You can spot "this person's chart draws help from others" without working through every relationship by hand. But a label describes what it is attached to; it does not set the value of the thing.

Why the count changes from site to site

This is the heart of it. There is no settled canonical list of sinsal. Different counts are not a calculation error — they come from different lists.

Sinsal descend from an older stream of practice that predates the Ziping method, and are commonly said to number in the hundreds. Only a fraction get used in actual readings, and where to draw the line varies by school and by practitioner.

The Korean Namuwiki article on sinsal shows this plainly. It does not list them as one flat set; it splits them into two tiers. The first eleven are ones "most practitioners who have studied saju use," whose value is broadly acknowledged. The remaining fifteen are described as carrying less weight for inferring a life, with more than a few practitioners knowing only how to place them.

So even within a single reference work, sinsal come with a hierarchy. If site A uses thirty and site B uses ten, neither is wrong — they chose different ranges. Your chart did not change; the ruler did.

The forty stars we read — the full map

Our saju calculation judges forty sinsal. The table below is all forty, grouped into three currents for readability: nine under Fortune, eleven under Talent, twenty under Challenge.

One note before you scan it. The third current is called "Challenge," yet it contains a talent for healing (Healer Star), honorable stability (Honor Star), and light in darkness(Moon's Gift). If that feels off, the table is not the problem — the habit of reading "sal" as "misfortune" is. A current is not a grade of good and bad; it marks the direction the force points.

Each current has its own texture. Fortune tends to describe help arriving from outside, Talent something extending outward from within, and Challenge a force applied strongly enough that direction starts to matter.

For a closer look at each, the three companion guides take one current apiece: stars of fortune, stars of talent, and stars of challenge. Three individual stars draw enough searches to get their own articles — Dohwasal, Yeokmasal, and Wonjinsal.

Why the twelve are counted separately

Search for sinsal and "the twelve sinsal" comes up constantly: Geopsal, Jaesal, Cheonsal, Jisal, Nyeonsal (Dohwa), Wolsal, Mangsinsal, Jangseongsal, Banansal, Yeokmasal, Yukhaesal, and Hwagaesal.

These twelve are not an arbitrary slice of the forty above. They are a self-contained set assigned in order across the twelve branches, keyed to the trine that your year or day branch belongs to. So they are better understood as twelve arranged on a different axis than as "twelve out of forty."

If trines are unfamiliar, start with how branches combine and clash. Once trines make sense, it becomes obvious why Dohwasal and Yeokmasal only ever land on certain characters.

Myth 1: many stars mean a bad chart

A count is not a grade. As the table shows, names carrying the character "sal" include clearly usable things: magnetic charm (Dohwasal), a star of self-branding (Mangsinsal), a talent for healing (Cheonuiseong).

"Six stars turned up" means six labels are attached to your eight characters, not that six bad events are scheduled. A lot of labels is closer to a signal that the arrangement has strong, distinguishable features.

Myth 2: auspicious stars are always good, inauspicious ones always bad

The same star works in opposite directions depending on what surrounds it. Namuwiki notes that Yanginsal was treated as ominous in a feudal society, as a force that broke shared order — but that in modern society you need exactly that kind of strength to protect yourself.

Baekhosal tells a similar story. It was once the only star grand enough to carry the title "great sal," and the same article observes that today it draws far less concern. The meaning of the star did not change; the society that has a use for that force did.

This is why sorting stars into good and bad is the worst way to read them. You have to know which elements help you before you can judge which way a given star points, and that method belongs to the yongsin guide.

Myth 3: inauspicious stars have to be removed

Sinsal are not objects that attach and detach. They are names for arrangements among your eight characters. The arrangement cannot be deleted, so "removing" one is not a coherent idea.

What actually helps is reading order. Where a star sits and what it interlocks with tells you far more than whether it appeared at all. That is why this article keeps talking about arrangement instead of count.

Checking them in your own chart

Sinsal do not appear by magic. Each one has a fixed starting point, and knowing that point lets you verify for yourself why a star showed up.

Great Noble, for instance, takes the heavenly stem of your birth day and checks whether its paired branches appear anywhere in the chart. Magnetic Charm looks to the trine your year or day branch belongs to and finds the cardinal branch of that group. Because the anchors differ, some stars would vanish if your birth day changed, and others only if your birth year did.

If the day stem means little to you yet, try the ten day masters; for the branches, start with stems and branches.

Why the same chart gives different results

Beyond list ranges, there is a second cause. Schools sometimes disagree on the conditions under which a star counts at all. Baekhosal is the clearest case.

Namuwiki defines Baekhosal as day-pillar only, stating explicitly that a match standing alone in the year, month, or hour pillar does not establish it. Our calculation, by contrast, recognises the pair wherever it appears among the four pillars.

This article does not rule on which is correct. What is worth knowing is that this is a real reason the same chart can show Baekhosal on one site and not another. When results diverge, the first thing to check is not your chart but the conditions each side applied.

One sentence to remember

Open your own chart in the app and ask this: which current are my stars clustered in? A lean toward one side is the character of your arrangement.

See my sinsal free

Sources and how the evidence was handled

The forty rows above were transferred by matching the calculation data this service actually uses to judge sinsal against its sinsal knowledge dataset, one to one. The counts per current — nine, eleven, twenty — were taken from that same data, and the hanja follow the knowledge dataset's notation. The definition of sinsal and the split between sin (神) and sal (殺) come from the Korean Wikipedia entry on sinsal; the tiering among sinsal and the modern reassessment of Yanginsal and Baekhosal come from the Namuwiki article on saju sinsal, last edited 1 August 2026.

Three things are left undecided.First, how far Baekhosal extends across the pillars is a point of disagreement between schools, so this article states only which convention our calculation follows. Second, the claim that "there are hundreds of sinsal" is widely repeated but no fixed list exists anywhere, so this article says only "the forty we read." Third, we confirmed that sinsal appear in classics such as the Yuanhai Ziping and the Sanming Tonghui, but we did not open those texts to compare wording directly — which is why not one classical quotation appears in this article. Entries whose name ends in "sal" while the hanja reads "star" (Hwagaesal, Cheonmunseong) also vary by source, so they were left as recorded.

In the course of checking, we found an error in the previous version of this very article. Its body text said "37 in total (9 fortune, 10 talent, 18 challenge)" while the table directly beneath it carried forty rows. Prose and table disagreed by three, and by the calculation data forty is correct. Three entries — Mentor Star, Exam Blessing, and Early Bloomer — were also filed under the wrong current, and have been corrected here. To keep that drift from recurring, a check now compares these published numbers against the calculation data.

This article does not predict events, wealth, health, or lifespan from any star, and does not sort stars into good and bad. Sinsal are a supporting tool, read inside the elemental relationships of the whole chart.