Ketu's is the shortest period after the Sun's and often the strangest. Ketu is the south node, the headless body, and its seven years take things away — not always painfully, but decisively: a job, a belief, a place, a certainty the person did not know they were leaning on. What is left is sharper. People in a Ketu mahadasha often become interested in what lies behind appearances: medicine, research, mathematics, spiritual practice, the past.
The period opens the cycle for everyone born with the Moon in Ashwini, Magha or Mula, so for them it is the first years of life, and the texts read a Ketu childhood as unusual — an early loss or separation, a solitary or otherworldly child, an illness that is hard to name. Later in life the dasha is a hinge: it closes a long chapter (Mercury's) and opens Venus's twenty years of worldly enjoyment, and the contrast is often felt as a spiritual pause before a material spring.
How it goes depends on Ketu's house from the lagna and on the planets it sits with; Ketu gives the results of the lord of its sign and of any graha conjunct it. In the 12th, 9th or 5th it is the classical season for insight and release; in the 7th or 4th it unsettles partnership or home. The antardashas — Ketu's own, then Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, none longer than fourteen months — bring the shorter weather.
What Ketu brings
Traditionally, Ketu brings detachment, sharpness, the unusual. A mahadasha is that graha's turn to colour the years: the house it holds from the lagna, the houses it rules and the planets it sits with all say what its 7 years are spent on. The antardasha inside it — each of the nine grahas in turn — sets the shorter weather.
Ketu mahadasha by house
The tradition reads the period first from the house the lord holds in the birth chart, counted from the lagna in whole signs:
- 1st house. A Ketu period from the 1st brings detachment from the self and puzzling health.
- 2nd house. A Ketu period from the 2nd brings indifference to wealth and cutting speech.
- 3rd house. A Ketu period from the 3rd brings sudden courage and loosened sibling bonds.
- 4th house. A Ketu period from the 4th brings detachment from home and mother.
- 5th house. A Ketu period from the 5th brings intuition and a karmic thread with children.
- 6th house. A Ketu period from the 6th removes enemies and disease quietly, though diagnosis is elusive.
- 7th house. A Ketu period from the 7th brings detachment in partnership and lessons in release.
- 8th house. A Ketu period from the 8th brings occult insight and sudden endings.
- 9th house. A Ketu period from the 9th brings doubt, mysticism and distance from the father.
- 10th house. A Ketu period from the 10th brings an unusual career turn and detachment from status.
- 11th house. A Ketu period from the 11th brings gains that come and go and few attachments.
- 12th house. A Ketu period from the 12th is the season of release — solitude, foreign lands, a spiritual turning.
The antardashas of Ketu
Each mahadasha is divided among the nine lords in the Vimshottari order, beginning with its own; the length of each is the mahadasha's years times the antardasha lord's, divided by 120:
| Antardasha | Length |
|---|---|
| Ketu–Ketu | 4 months 27 days |
| Ketu–Venus | 1 year 2 months |
| Ketu–Sun | 4 months 6 days |
| Ketu–Moon | 7 months |
| Ketu–Mars | 4 months 27 days |
| Ketu–Rahu | 1 year 18 days |
| Ketu–Jupiter | 11 months 6 days |
| Ketu–Saturn | 1 year 1 month 9 days |
| Ketu–Mercury | 11 months 27 days |
Who begins life in the Ketu mahadasha
Ketu rules three nakshatras. A natal Moon in any of them starts the cycle in the Ketu mahadasha, with the balance set by how far into the nakshatra the Moon stood: