Ketu is the other end of Rahu's axis — the point where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic heading south. In the myth it's the asura's severed body: a body with no head, so it doesn't want, doesn't look, doesn't cling. That image is its mechanism: Ketu governs release, intuition, skill carried over from before, seclusion, spiritual practice, and detachment from the material.
Rahu swallows forward, Ketu lets go backward. Wherever Ketu sits you have an odd fluency and an odd indifference — as though you already knew it, and didn't much care. The tradition says Ketu 'acts like Mars': it cuts fast and cuts hard, but what it cuts is the attachment between you and things. It's the most spiritual point on the chart, and the one most likely to make everything feel pointless.
Where you'll recognise it: things you can do naturally and don't want to, caring less about the material, intuition that's accurate and unexplainable, sudden urges to withdraw from all of it. Running well, Ketu is your freest part: unseized, seeing through, able to release, spiritually deep. Stuck, it's detachment or nihilism — wanting nothing so completely that nothing gets done, avoidance called transcendence. Ketu's lesson is that after letting go you still have to live: release isn't leaving the world, it's being in it without being held.
