The Ketu antardasha

the Ketu antardasha, a sub-period of Ketu falling within any mahadasha of the Vimshottari sequence

What the tradition reads

Every mahadasha in the Vimshottari sequence divides into nine antardashas, one for each graha, each lasting a length proportional to that planet's own share of the hundred and twenty year cycle, so the Ketu antardasha, drawn from Ketu's own seven years, is one of the briefer sub-periods the system produces, tied with Mars and longer only than the Sun's. Phaladeepika's rule for the sub-periods holds that a planet's dasha effects recur again in its bhukti and antara, so a Ketu antardasha is read through the same lens as a Ketu mahadasha at smaller scale, trouble from enemies, thieves or those in authority, wounds, illness from excessive heat, family disgrace and danger from fire where the placement is poor, tempered where the rest of the chart supports it toward a shorter season of detachment, introspection or release instead. Because Ketu has no steady, cumulative growth of its own kind to offer even at full mahadasha length, its short antardasha is read as a brief, unsettling interruption within whatever the ruling mahadasha is building, a stretch in which something is let go of or stripped away rather than added, over quickly either way.

The story

Ketu is the headless body left behind when Vishnu's discus severed the asura Svarbhanu at the throat, unable to die because the nectar of immortality had already reached that far, and is pictured ever after as a torso without a head, often riding a vulture, an image the tradition reads as renunciation itself, a form that needs nothing further because it no longer has the means to want. A sub-period this short and this stripped down, entering a longer mahadasha governed by another planet only to depart again quickly, matches a figure defined by absence rather than by any single active myth of its own: Ketu's antardasha is read as the moment inside a larger period when something is relinquished, whether willingly or not, before the sequence moves on to the next planet's turn, the same abrupt, decisive cut that made Ketu what it is in the first place.

Written from

Corpus key antardasha:Ketu.