Ketu Mahadasha

Ketu is the point opposite Rahu on the Moon's path, and where Rahu is appetite, Ketu is its exhaustion. The texts give it detachment, inquiry, sudden perception, ancestral matters, solitude and a loss of interest in what has already been gained. Its mahadasha is traditionally described as a period in which things that once mattered come to feel oddly weightless: some pursuits are dropped, some ties thin out without a quarrel, and attention turns inward or towards questions with no obvious use. The pace is quiet for long stretches and then abrupt, and the lessons concern letting go, telling the essential from the habitual, and being at ease with not knowing.

Like Rahu, Ketu rules no sign, so the period takes its colour from the sign Ketu occupies, that sign's lord, and any planet beside it. Ketu in the twelfth, ninth or third house, or with its dispositor strong and well housed, is described as a period of productive withdrawal: study, pilgrimage or quiet mastery of a narrow craft. Ketu in the first, fourth or seventh house, or beside the Moon or the lagna lord, is described as a period in which the sense of self and home feels unsettled. Ketu with Jupiter tends to make the inquiry philosophical, with Mars more impatient, with Venus more a matter of what no longer pleases.

The antardashas open with Ketu's own sub period of about five months, then run through Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury. The Venus antardasha, fourteen months and the longest, often pulls the person back towards company just as the period has turned inward; the Sun, Moon and Mars sub periods are short and change the tone every few months; the Rahu antardasha places the two nodes together and can be the most disorienting stretch; and the Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury antardashas settle the period and lead into the long Venus mahadasha.

A Ketu mahadasha is not an omen of loss, illness, isolation or ruin, and the fear that surrounds it in popular writing has no basis in the classical descriptions, which speak of tendencies in attention and attachment rather than events. It is not a date for renunciation any more than for anything else, and seven years is long enough for ordinary life to carry on throughout. Nor does Ketu silence the rest of the chart: the lagna lord, the Moon, Ketu's dispositor, the transits and the antardasha lord all keep working.