Ketu

When Vishnu's discus severed Svarbhanu at the neck during the Samudra Manthan, the head became Rahu — and the body, immortal in its own right, became Ketu. Without a head, Ketu is traditionally depicted without eyes to see, a mouth to consume, or a mind to plan and desire in the ordinary sense. Where Rahu is defined by endless pursuit, Ketu is defined by what remains after pursuit ends — release rather than acquisition.

Rahu and Ketu were, in this telling, once a single being, divided by the same stroke that created the two nodes now read as opposite ends of one karmic axis. Classical Jyotish treats this shared origin as essential: the two are not independent forces but two phases of a single arc, one pulling the native outward into the world (Rahu), the other pulling inward and away from it (Ketu). Neither is read as complete without the other.

As karaka of spirituality, past-life karma, and liberation (moksha), Ketu's placement is traditionally read as showing both innate, hard-to-explain abilities carried in from prior conditioning and the specific attachments a chart is being pushed to release in this lifetime. A prominent Ketu is often associated with an old-soul quality — indifference to purely worldly achievement paired with unusually direct intuition — and, correspondingly, with real difficulty in ordinary communication or a clear sense of direction.

In the body, Ketu is traditionally linked to subtle rather than structural systems — nervous sensitivity, unusual or hard-to-diagnose symptoms, the domain classical texts describe loosely as governing the more mysterious end of physiology, distinct from Saturn's structural and chronic conditions. Where Venus binds through attraction and Saturn restrains through limitation, Ketu is unique among the grahas in that its core action is dissolution rather than construction.

Ketu's most consistent influence in predictive astrology is the transit that ends something — a role, a relationship, an identity — in a way that initially reads as loss and only later as clearing space for what the native actually needed. Classical remedies — wearing cat's eye, sustained meditation practice, service performed without seeking recognition — are aimed at that same principle: not resisting Ketu's tendency to strip things away, but learning to meet it without being destabilized by it.