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Ketu in Vedic Astrology · Shadow Graha · Astrovene
Ketu is the second of the two shadow points, the other place where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's. It is always exactly a hundred and eighty degrees from Rahu, so the pair is one axis rather than two independent positions, and moving one moves the other.
Its three nakshatras are Ashwini, Magha and Mula, and each begins a fire sign exactly on the boundary: Aries, Leo and Sagittarius. Where Mercury's three close the water signs, Ketu's three open the fire signs that follow them. Together those six edges form the three junctions the tradition calls gandanta, the seams where one elemental order hands over to another.
Because the Vimshottari cycle is counted from Ashwini, Ketu also opens the dasha sequence, running Ketu, Venus, Sun and onward. Seven of the hundred and twenty years are its own, tying with Mars and beaten only by the Sun's six.
The structures the seven classical grahas carry, Ketu does not. It lords no sign, holds no moolatrikona, and its exaltation and debilitation are unsettled across schools. It appears in no natural friendship table either, there being no consensus one to appear in.
In the classical Parashari scheme it casts no drishti of its own. What the tradition says instead is that Ketu expresses through the lord of the sign it occupies and through the grahas it joins, taking on their character rather than imposing one of its own. That indirectness is the thread across sources that otherwise differ.
The convention here counts the shadow points among the malefics, though holding them in a category of their own is an equally old practice. Healing, spirituality, investigation and craftsmanship are its occupational domains. Its position is derived directly from Rahu's, so the mean-node default and the true-node option apply to both ends of the axis alike.