Planets

The Meaning of the Ketu in Vedic Astrology

Ketu

Meaning of the Ketu

Ketu represents the following: South Node of the Moon — the Dragon’s Tail, weapons and sharp instruments, pain, occult, witchcraft, mysticism, philosophy, salvation, great penance, fallacious reasoning, illusion and false knowledge, slaughter and butchery, cheating and hustling, slavery, imprisonment, severe penalties and punishment, hysteria, madness, serpents, betrayal, violent death, fire element, epidemics, firearms and pyrotechnics. Ketu is commonly understood to reflect the same qualities as Mars.

KETU, the South Node of the Moon, the Dragon’s Tail

Ketu is not a member of the planetary cabinet as such but can more accurately be regarded as an outcast. Ketu represents the following: weapons and sharp instruments, pain, occultism, witchcraft, fallacious reasoning, illusion and false knowledge, slaughter and butchery, cheating and hustling, slavery, imprisonment, severe penalties and punishment, hysteria, madness, animalistic behavior, obsessive-compulsive disorders, unconscious impulses, betrayal, violent death, epidemics, firearms and pyrotechnics, philosophy, salvation, great penance, serpents, flags, oil, iron, and handicapped people.

Ketu causes people to become fed up with life here on earth which either leads them to self-destruction or toward liberation of the soul by reducing their material desires and removing the impetus for generating more karma. Ketu leads to enlightenment which frees one from the bondage of repeated birth and death and further incarnations. It bestows spiritual tendencies, asceticism and detachment toward worldly desires and ambitions. 

Ketu’s favorable glance results in wisdom and spiritual knowledge, the knowledge of the self. It bestows psychic abilities and makes its beneficiaries masters of the healing arts, natural healing, herbalists, tantric healing, and healing of persons possessed by evil spirits, ghosts and astral forces. 

When afflicted, Ketu can cause imprisonment, accidents, fear, anxiety, leprosy, skin diseases, starvation or death by starvation, pain in the joints, fevers  and excessive heat in the body. It torments some with nightmares and turns others into conspirators who hatch plots against real and imagined enemies. Ketu employs terrible and devious methods to bring about destruction.

In Ayurvedic medicine, Ketu rules pitta or the physical constitution dominated by the element of fire.

Ketu is depicted as the headless torso of a man with the body of a fish. He waves his own flag, either in self-promotion or as a warning of his impending entrance upon the karmic battlefield.