Fortune Guide
Which questions do maiunse's 40 readings each suit, and how does each differ from its neighbors? A side-by-side primer on what each system is for and where it comes from.
maiunse brings Eastern destiny studies, Western astrology and numerology, personality tests and dream interpretation together in one place. Knowing which reading suits which question, and how look-alike readings differ, makes choosing easier, and each reading's own page picks up from there with how it works.
Saju & Traditional (16) Astrology & Tarot (10) Psychology & Fun (14)
Saju & Traditional
Today's Fortune
Before the day gets going, this is where you get a feel for whether today is one to push ahead or one to catch your breath. If the Four Pillars are the long map of a whole life, this is more like a weather forecast laid over that map for a single day, and unlike the biorhythm or the lucky numbers, which also run on the date, it keeps the saju arithmetic itself: how the day's stem-and-branch pair relates to your day master. Its roots lie in the old practice of date selection, which tagged every day of the calendar with its stem and branch and singled out the auspicious ones.
Four Pillars (Saju)
When you want to see your inborn temperament and the broad currents of your life in one place, this is the bedrock the site's Eastern readings stand on. The Day Pillar reading lifts out only the two characters of your birth day, the Birth-Hour Sign only the animal of your birth hour, and Today's Fortune lays the day's stem and branch over your chart, so the Four Pillars are the original they all branch off from. The main lines of interpretation come down from classics such as the Yuanhai Ziping, the Ziping Zhenquan and the Di Tian Sui, which is also why different schools put slightly different weight on the same chart. So if any of those narrower readings leaves you wanting the deeper reason, the natural next step is to come back to these eight characters and read them again as one whole structure.
Birth-Hour Sign
This suits you when you remember roughly what time of day you were born more clearly than anything else, or when the stories attached to your birth-year animal never quite felt like you. Where the Chinese Zodiac looks at the branch of your birth year and the Four Pillars weigh all four pillars, the Birth-Hour Sign narrows in on the single branch of the hour pillar, making it the lightest and most focused reading in the saju family. Names such as the Hour of the Rat or the Hour of the Ox were also everyday words for telling the time in old East Asia, and old records are full of hours written down under those very names.
Day Pillar (Ilju)
It works well when a full chart feels like too much and you just want the core of who you are in a single line, or when you and a friend or partner want to compare day pillars and talk it over. The Four Pillars weigh the whole structure of eight characters, while the day pillar stays with the two that stand for you, and unlike Today's Fortune, which reads the stem and branch of a passing day, it reads those of your birth day, which never change. Day-pillar lore, which gives a character portrait to each of the sixty pillars, usually comes early in a saju primer, and looking up one's own day pillar in short pieces is still a thriving habit.
Tojeong Bigyeol
Much like the New Year custom of a family sitting together and reading out each other's fortunes, this is the book to open when you want to hear, as one story, what frame of mind to bring into the twelve months ahead. The Chinese Zodiac also changes from year to year, but it reads mainly through the relationship between your animal and the year's reigning branch, whereas Tojeong Bigyeol reads the verse attached to one of 144 hexagrams, so the text you receive is divided far more finely than by animal sign. Rather than counting the strength of energies as the Four Pillars do, it delivers good and bad fortune in figurative, almost poetic lines, and that is often named as the reason the book has stayed so loved. If you have already looked at the broad shape of a year through the annual luck in the Four Pillars, reading the same year again through Tojeong's images lets you compare two voices.
Compatibility
This is the compatibility reading to open when you want to look closely at someone you may share a long road with, as in marriage or a business partnership. Zodiac Compatibility sets one character from each birth year side by side and Name Compatibility weighs stroke counts, whereas this one lays the two full charts next to each other, which makes it the most involved and the most finely grained of the compatibility readings. In a traditional Korean wedding, the groom's family sending the bride's family a letter bearing his four pillars was called napchae, and on receiving it the bride's side matched the two charts before choosing the wedding date. If you are unsure which compatibility reading to start with, it is natural to begin lightly with animal signs or star signs and move here once the relationship deepens.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do both people need to know their birth hour?
- Does a low score mean we are a bad match?
- Can I use this for someone other than a partner?
- What if only one of us knows the birth hour?
- If the two of you were born in different places, is the time corrected separately?
- Why do you ask for gender?
- What if the two people use different calendars?
Chinese Zodiac
Open this when you want to chat about how the year looks for the animals of family members or friends, or to check whether a familiar word such as samjae, the three-year spell of caution, applies to you. Tojeong Bigyeol speaks through the verses of its hexagrams, while the Chinese Zodiac speaks through the pull and push between branches, harmony on one side and clash on the other, and unlike the Birth-Hour Sign, which follows the animal of the hour you arrived, it goes by the animal people know you by. In the folktale of the twelve animals racing across a river for their places, the rat rides on the ox's back and leaps off just in time to come first, and the story has long helped people remember the order of the signs. Asking which animal someone was born under is so woven into Korean daily life that it often serves as a polite way of asking a person's age, which makes this a good reading to open together at family gatherings.
Name Analysis
Turn to this when naming a child or picking a pen name or a shop name, or when you are simply curious what kind of sound your everyday name carries. Name Compatibility is a game that sets two names against each other, while Name Analysis looks deeply at one person's name, reading a Hangul name by the five elements of its sounds and yin-yang and a romanized name by the arithmetic of numerology, and where the Four Pillars read what you were born with, a name reads what you put on by calling and being called over a lifetime. Reading names by sound took root in Korea alongside numerological name study based on Chinese-character strokes, partly because it lets a Hangul name be read through Hangul's own system of sounds. That different name consultants often judge the same name differently comes from exactly these differing foundations, so there is no need to treat one school's answer as a final verdict.
Zodiac Compatibility
Even without knowing someone's birthday or birth time, the two animal signs are enough for a rough sense, so it suits light relationships such as people you have just met or colleagues at work. If Four Pillars compatibility is the inner match that overlays two whole charts, this is the outer match that sets one animal against another, and where Sign Compatibility is the Western way of comparing star signs, this is the Eastern way of comparing the branches of two birth years. It is exactly the reckoning elders used to run first when a match was proposed, warning that the Rat and the Horse clash.
Feng Shui Directions
Consult this when you are torn about how to use a space, such as choosing a home to move into or deciding which way a desk or bed should face. Although both grew out of the same nine numbers of the Luo Shu, Nine Star Ki applies those numbers to temperament and the flow of years, while Eight Mansions feng shui maps them onto the eight directions of a home to match a person with a space, and unlike yin-house feng shui, which studies grave sites and mountain contours, it belongs to the yang-house school that deals with homes for the living. The Eight Mansions method was set down in books such as the Bazhai Mingjing, widely read in the Qing dynasty, and seeped into East Asian customs of building and keeping house.
Palmistry
Keep this guide at hand when you have occasion to compare hands with someone, or when you want to open your palm and study it quietly on your own. Face Reading covers seven parts of the face and this guide covers the lines of the palm, and because both read only what the eye can see, without any date, they belong to a different branch from the Four Pillars or astrology, which calculate from a birth date. Western palmistry gave planetary names to the raised pads beneath the fingers, such as the Mount of Venus and the Mount of Jupiter, so the vocabularies of palmistry and astrology have long overlapped.
Face Reading
Open this guide when you wonder why a first impression reads the way it does, or which parts of the face people of the past looked at to size someone up. Where the Five-Element Face groups the whole face into one of five types and the Animal Face Test sums up an impression in a word, this guide takes features such as the eyebrows, nose and ears one by one and reads each on its own. The Liuzhuang Xiangfa, compiled in the Ming dynasty, is quoted about as often as the Mayi Xiangfa, and the face manuals urge readers to weigh complexion and bearing no less than the shape of the features.
Five-Element Face
This suits you when, rather than weighing feature by feature, you want the big picture of which element your whole face leans toward. The Animal Face Test is a game of naming impressions in today's words, while the Five-Element Face follows the categories of the traditional face manuals, and although it shares the five elements with the Four Pillars, it finds them in the shape of a face rather than in a birth date. The old manuals welcomed a face that mixed two types whose elements produce one another and frowned on one whose types overcome one another, carrying the cycles of the five elements straight onto the face. If you are starting out in face reading, a natural order is to learn the overall character of the face through these five types first and then move down to the meaning of each feature in Face Reading.
I Ching Trigram
It fits when you need one short symbol to hold the day up to rather than a grand divination, say a word to steady yourself with in the morning. Unlike Yut Divination, which leaves the outcome to the throwing hand, this trigram is set by a calculation from the date, and it is far simpler than a full I Ching consultation that builds all six lines to ask about fortune. Legend credits Fu Xi with first tracing the eight trigrams, and the two diagrams that arrange them in the Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven orders were organized and spread by Song-dynasty scholars.
Yut Divination
Calling up memories of tossing yut sticks at holiday gatherings, this is the game-like divination to reach for when you want a light read on the mood of the day. Unlike the I Ching Trigram, which is fixed by the date and the same for everyone that day, a yut throw comes out differently every time, and instead of reading a large set of verses as Tojeong Bigyeol does, it answers simply with one of five outcomes. The reading of do, gae, geol, yut and mo as pig, dog, sheep, cow and horse comes with a theory that it traces back to the livestock names attached to official titles in the ancient kingdom of Buyeo.
Nine Star Ki
Nine Star Ki, widely used in Japan to judge moving directions and the luck of a year, is explored here with the focus on the temperament of the star you were born under. Eight Mansions feng shui takes the same Luo Shu numbers into the directions of a house, whereas Nine Star Ki applies them to character and the flow of each year, and it settles your star from far simpler material than the eight characters of a Four Pillars chart. The present form of Nine Star Ki is known to have been systematized in early twentieth-century Japan by Sonoda Shinjiro, and one explanation holds that the nine stars take their names from the seven of the Big Dipper plus two more.
Astrology & Tarot
Decans
Use this when star-sign descriptions only half fit you and you want to go one step further inside the same sign. The Horoscope looks at the twelve signs the Sun passes through, while the decans split each of those into three to see the sky as thirty-six parts, and rather than setting two people side by side as Sign Compatibility does, they divide one person's character more finely. Medieval European astrology called the decans faces and gave each one a figure of its own, and those faces are painted in the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy. When a family member or friend who shares your sign feels quite different from you, it is part of the fun to check whether the two of you stand in different decans.
Horoscope
This is usually the first reading people reach for, whether to check the mood of the morning or to describe their own nature in Western terms. The decans split one sign into three for a finer view and Sign Compatibility sets two people's signs against each other, while the Horoscope is the hub that takes your Sun sign as its axis and reads the Moon and Sun as they move day by day. The newspaper star column is often traced to 1930, when the astrologer R.H. Naylor wrote up the stars of the newborn Princess Margaret for a British Sunday paper. If astrology is new to you, getting used to the elements and modalities here first and then widening out to the decans and Sign Compatibility lets you read all of them in the same vocabulary.
Sign Compatibility
Handy when all you know is the other person's sign, it also makes for a light chat among friends about how their signs get along. It is the Western counterpart of Zodiac Compatibility, but it uses the twelve signs of the zodiac instead of the twelve earthly branches, and unlike MBTI Compatibility, which sets personality types against each other, it measures the spacing between places in the sky. The arrangement in which the three signs of one element form an equilateral triangle in the sky, each 120 degrees from the next, was called a trigon in Hellenistic astrology, and the idea that signs of the same element get along comes from there.
Tarot
When something is weighing on you and you cannot tell where to start untangling it, tarot is the tool for framing one question and finding a thread to pull. Yes/No Tarot centers on a verdict from one card and a rune answers briefly through the meaning of a single letter, while tarot can lay out several cards and weave the flow of a situation into a story, so it serves more broadly for sorting out your thoughts. Much of the symbolism layered into the card images owes to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late nineteenth-century British occult society that overlaid the cards with correspondences from the Kabbalah and astrology.
Tarot Birth Card
Whether you want one symbol that follows you through life or a first doorway into tarot, this reading is a good fit. Unlike a tarot spread that is shuffled anew for every question, this card is settled before you ask anything, and unlike numerology, which reads a number by its qualities, it turns that number into the pictured story of one of the twenty-two cards. The claim of the eighteenth-century French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin that tarot was a book holding the wisdom of ancient Egypt is now seen as baseless fancy, but the tradition of reading the cards as a language of symbols began with him.
Yes/No Tarot
From light forks in the road such as what to have for lunch to a small question lodged in a corner of your mind, this is the oracle for a quick look with a single card. Where tarot suits open questions about how things might unfold, Yes/No Tarot is built for closed questions about whether to do something, and unlike a coin toss, each verdict comes with the symbolism of a card that leaves you something to think about. Divination that picks one of two answers was common in old practices using sticks or coins, and an oracle that attaches yes or no verdicts to tarot cards is a light modern variation.
Rune of the Day
It suits a morning when you need one word to carry in your mind, a short and solid symbol to hold your thoughts in place. Tarot unfolds a story through picture cards, while a rune answers with the name and meaning of a single letter, and rather than handing down a verdict as Yes/No Tarot does, it offers the direction that letter points to as advice. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Germanic peoples carved marks on slips of wood, scattered them and read the omens, and the passage is often quoted as evidence of rune casting, though whether those marks were runes is far from certain.
Numerology
Use this when you want to sort out the patterns that keep recurring in your life, or which chapter of it you are now passing through, in the simple language of numbers. Unlike the Tarot Birth Card, which turns your birth date into a tarot picture, numerology reads the qualities of the numbers themselves, and unlike Name Analysis, which borrows the same arithmetic for romanized names, it looks at your birthday and name together. Besides the Pythagorean method there is a separate Chaldean tradition that gives letters only the values one to eight, so the same name can come out as a different number depending on which method counts it. So rather than a reading you look at once and close, it is one worth reopening at the turning points of life to see which chapter you are standing in.
Birthstone & Flower
Turn to this when choosing a gem as a gift, or when you want the symbols and flower meanings tied to your birth month as something to talk about. It sits in the same family as the Celtic Tree Sign and the Birth Weekday, readings that take their emblem from when you came into the world, yet where those cut the calendar into thirteen stretches or seven weekdays, the gem list keeps to the familiar twelve months. Many trace the idea of matching gems to the twelve months to the twelve stones set in the high priest's breastplate in the Bible and to old interpretations that linked them to the months and the signs of the zodiac.
Celtic Tree Sign
Tree lovers, or anyone who wants a symbol other than a star sign to reflect their temperament, will find this a good pick. Western astrology, which also works from your birthday, reads character through planets and elements, whereas the Celtic tree sign likens character to a tree's form and uses, and unlike the birthstone, which takes a mineral as its emblem, it gives you a living tree as your own. Ogham inscriptions survive on several hundred standing stones, most of them in Ireland, which makes the script one of the oldest written records of the Irish language.
Psychology & Fun
MBTI Personality
It works well as a shared vocabulary for each other's tendencies when you want to understand how you differ from the people at a new school or a new job. If the Enneagram probes the motive beneath behavior, MBTI asks about preferences, such as where you draw energy from and how you make decisions, and unlike blood type, it is not a category handed to you at birth but a type you reach by reflecting on your own preferences. Jung's Psychological Types, on which it rests, set out to divide people not by better or worse but by the direction the mind turns, and Myers and Briggs are said to have turned the idea into questionnaires to help people looking for new jobs during the war.
MBTI Compatibility
Not only a partner but a teammate or a roommate, anyone you deal with every day, can be the other half of this compatibility reading when you want to see why the two of you keep crossing wires on certain things. MBTI Personality looks deeply at one person's type, while this one focuses on how two types mesh on the four axes, and because it sorts personalities into types and sets them side by side rather than counting from birth dates as the Four Pillars or the zodiac do, it sits with Blood Type Match in the psychology and fun family. The organization behind MBTI does not promote the idea that only certain types go well together, so type compatibility is closer to a way of reading that people have built and enjoyed themselves.
Blood Type Personality
Blood types come up in conversation all the time, and this reading is just right for laughing together over where the image attached to each type came from. Among four-way divisions, Sasang constitution puts its weight on bodily tendencies and food while the blood type reading puts it on images of personality, and unlike MBTI, a type you reach through questions, it simply reads a type already fixed. The idea of linking blood type and temperament began with a paper by the Japanese educator Takeji Furukawa in the early twentieth century and became a craze again much later through the books of the broadcast writer Masahiko Nomi.
Blood Type Match
It suits easing the mood by swapping blood types with someone new, or pointing out with a laugh the habits that differ in a long-standing relationship. Where Blood Type Personality portrays one person, this one looks at the pair two types make, and since four types form only ten pairings, it reads from a far simpler table than MBTI Compatibility does. Blood type compatibility spread as a staple of the romance pages in Japanese and Korean magazines and TV shows, so it is closer to a game made by popular culture than to science.
Sasang Constitution
If you take an interest in your body's habits or the foods that agree with you, this offers a light sense of which constitution you are closest to. Like blood types it divides people into four, but it is a branch of Korean medicine that looks at the leanings of body and mind together, and where Personal Color deals with the tone you see on the surface, Sasang deals with an inner balance, the relative size of the organs. Lee Je-ma completed the Dongui Suse Bowon in 1894, and after his death his disciples polished the manuscript and published it as a book.
Enneagram
It helps when you want to understand why the same behavior is driven by different reasons in different people, and it is used to find threads for personal growth. MBTI is sixteen boxes built from four axes, while the Enneagram is nine points on a circle, and unlike MBTI, whose boxes stand apart, those nine points are joined by lines, so a person is seen as sometimes taking on the look of another number. The name Enneagram joins the Greek ennea, meaning nine, with gramma, meaning something drawn or written.
Color Psychology Test
When it is hard to put into words which way your heart is leaning lately, a single color you feel drawn to can offer a light thread to pull. Despite the similar name, it answers a different question from Personal Color, which matches shades to your complexion, because this one mirrors your inner weather, and unlike readings of what you were born with, such as blood type or weekday, it moves with your mood of the moment. The best-known test that reads the mind through color is the one devised by the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher, but this reading does not follow his procedure and instead borrows the impressions commonly linked to each color.
Personal Color
It helps when you want a feel for which color families brighten your face as you choose clothes or makeup. It takes a different path from the Color Psychology Test, which asks what colors your heart is drawn to, by looking at how colors harmonize with the tones of your skin, hair and eyes, and although it deals with impression as the Animal Face Test does, its yardstick is color harmony rather than features. This classification, which borrows the names of the seasons, reached a wide public when Color Me Beautiful by the American author Carole Jackson became a bestseller. That words like warm tone and cool tone are tossed around so often at cosmetics counters and clothing shops shows how far the system has become part of everyday language.
Animal Face Test
Laughing with friends over which animal each of you resembles, or deciding what mood to aim for in a profile photo, is exactly what this fun test is for. Face Reading and the Five-Element Face both follow face manuals centuries old, whereas animal types grew out of nicknames for celebrities' looks on TV and social media, so their lineage is entirely different. Likening people to animals is itself an old habit, and traditional physiognomy too handed down a mulhyeong approach that read a face and bearing by comparing them to creatures such as the tiger or the crane.
Birth Weekday
For a birthday celebration or the arrival of a new baby, this reading lets you pair your good wishes with the old lore of the weekday someone was born on. The birthstone looks at the month of birth and the Celtic tree sign at a span of dates, while the weekday splits people most broadly, into seven, and although it calculates no position of the Sun as star signs do, it connects to astrology through the planet each weekday is named after. Some cultures, such as the Akan of Ghana, name children after the weekday of their birth, so the idea of linking a weekday to a person lives on well beyond the English nursery rhyme.
Biorhythm
Before an important event, a graph of your ups and downs lets you see your condition at a glance and prepare yourself, and that is what this tool is for. Today's Fortune reads the day through the Eastern arithmetic of the day's stem and branch, whereas the biorhythm draws its curves from simple arithmetic on the number of days since birth, and although it changes daily like the lucky numbers, its changes follow fixed cycles that can be seen weeks in advance. In the 1970s the biorhythm was such a craze in Japan and the United States that dedicated calculators were sold for it, but later studies found no link to accidents or performance.
Lucky Numbers
Stuck picking a number with nothing to go on, you can peek at this small game for a cheerful excuse to settle on one. Today's Fortune, which uses the same date, reads the flow of the day in sentences, while the lucky numbers boil the day down to numbers and colors, and rather than unpacking the qualities of numbers at length as numerology does, they leave you only what you can use that day. Just as East Asia avoids 4, China welcomes 8 and the West treats 7 as lucky, the same number carries a different weight depending on the culture.
Name Compatibility
Here is the school-days pastime of writing two names side by side after falling for someone, ready to replay as a carefree compatibility game. Unlike Zodiac Compatibility or Blood Type Match, which set inborn categories against each other, Name Compatibility is a counting game that scores the strokes in the letters of two names, and when both names are in Hangul it adds a second layer, comparing them by the same sound elements that Name Analysis reads. Writing two names in the corner of a notebook and adding the numbers down to the bottom is a classroom scene passed on from generation to generation, so half the fun lies in doing the sums together rather than in the result.
Dream Reading
Reach for this dictionary when last night's dream lingers with unusual vividness and you want a clue to what the scene was trying to say. Most other readings on this site start from conditions you were born with, such as a birth date or a name, whereas dream interpretation starts from a scene you lived through, so the same person can arrive at entirely different readings depending on what they dreamed. In the East the Zhougong Jiemeng, which borrows the name of the Duke of Zhou, became a byword for dream books, while in the West the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus from the second century is counted as the oldest dream book to survive.
FAQ
Is maiunse free?
Yes. Every reading is free, and no sign-up is required.
Is my birth date stored?
Not on any server. All calculation happens inside your browser, and the birthday remembered for the Today's Flow shortcut is kept only in your own device's browser storage.
Can I enter a lunar or leap-month birthday?
Yes. Choose Lunar in the calendar selector; if that year and month contain a leap month, a leap-month checkbox appears. Dates are converted with an accurate lunisolar calendar internally.
Can I get a Saju reading without my birth time?
Yes. Select "Time unknown" and the chart is read from three pillars (year, month, day). Most analyses — day master, element balance, and more — are still provided. Beyond Saju, Saju compatibility and the Twelve Hours, the birth time also feeds the daily almanac, Tojeong Bigyeol, the day pillar, the Chinese zodiac reading and biorhythms; if you do not know it, only those parts are left out and the rest reads as usual.
How is Saju different from the horoscope?
Saju is Eastern destiny study reading the full stem-branch chart of your birth date and time and its element balance; the horoscope is Western astrology reading disposition from the Sun's position alone. Different systems, complementary pleasures.
How accurate are the readings?
Chart calculation — calendar conversion, solar terms, stem-branches — uses verified astronomical data. The interpretations, however, are reference and entertainment content based on traditional theory; keep important decisions your own.
Can I use it in different languages?
Yes. maiunse supports six languages—Korean, English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Switch from the language selector at the top and every reading is served in that language.
Are there fortunes that change every day?
Yes. Today's Fortune, the daily almanac, your sign's daily horoscope, the tarot Card of the Day, the I Ching trigram of the day and Lucky Numbers refresh each day by date, so a new result appears after midnight. Biorhythm values also shift with every date.
Can I save or share my results?
On most result screens you can create a share card (PNG) with the “Save Image” button, and your birth date and choices are kept in the URL, so the same result reopens from the link alone.
How do I use the dream dictionary?
Type the dream you are curious about (e.g., snake, pig, teeth) into the search box at the top of the Dreams page, or pick a category to browse related readings. Over 860 dream interpretations are offered in six languages, and the 134 most looked-up dreams have their own pages that split the reading by situation.
What kinds of fortunes can I check?
From traditional readings like Saju, Tojeong, and compatibility to horoscopes, tarot, and numerology, plus blood type, MBTI, palmistry, and dream interpretation — 40 fortunes in one place.
Do I need to sign up or log in?
No. You can use every feature for free without signing up or logging in. What you enter is never sent to a server and is used only within your browser.
What if I get a bad result?
A fortune is entertainment for reflecting on the flow, not a fixed fate. Take an unfavorable result as a sign to be careful — your mindset and effort can always shift the current.
What kinds of compatibility can I check?
Besides Saju compatibility, you can look at the bond between two people in several ways: Chinese zodiac, star sign, MBTI, name and blood type compatibility.
Does it work well on a phone?
Yes. You can use it right in a mobile browser with no app to install, and the layout is optimized for the screen. Add it to your home screen to open it as fast as an app.