Letting go of home
Returns about every 18½ years. What the transit means, then what was in the news and who was born each time it passed through Cancer since 1900, so you can test the teaching against the record, and against your own life.
Next visit
Dec 5, 2026
That is 1 month away. Last time it was here from April 2008 to November 2009.
Right now Ketu is in Leo →
Letting go of home
Ketu is the Moon's south node, a shadow planet with no body of its own. It stands for letting go, the past, sudden endings and the turn inward. It moves backward through the zodiac, and Rahu always sits in the opposite sign, reaching for what Ketu releases. Cancer is a movable water sign ruled by the Moon. The Moon is an enemy to Ketu in the tradition, so the planet is uneasy here: a planet of release in the sign of home, family and feeling safe.
With Rahu in Capricorn, status, structure and the reach of the state are what the world is reaching for. On the Ketu side, home and belonging come loose. People leave the places they were born in, or lose them. The lesson is that home is something carried as well as something kept.
Who in this record left home, and what did they take with them?
Three questions, in this order. They work for every planet and every sign.
Pick a visit to read its record. The most covered stories come first; the kinds of story show as colours.
Rahu and Ketu always sit opposite each other, so these visits are also the visits of Rahu in Capricorn, and the record is the same.
18 years ago
April 2008 to November 2009
Anyone born under a transit carries it in their birth chart. Those with a chart in our library open straight into it.
Too soon to tell. People born during this visit will appear here once they are grown and well known.
The same transit, a generation apart. Pick any two of Ketu's visits to Cancer and read them against each other.
Born then: Taylor Swift, Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence.
1989–91 leaned to politics and society, 2008–09 to conflict and disaster. The same transit set the backdrop both times; what played out in front of it differed.
What made the news. Every story in the record for Ketu's visits to Cancer, 250 in all, by kind, next to the usual mix across every transit since 1900.
| Kind of story | These visits | Usual |
|---|---|---|
| Conflict and disaster | 30% | 35% |
| Politics and society | 32% | 29% |
| Science and space | 14% | 13% |
| Culture and sport | 25% | 24% |
| Treaties and agreements | 13% | 10% |
Gold numbers differ from the usual mix by five points or more. Wikipedia covers some kinds of story more than others, and a few visits are a small sample, so treat a difference as something to notice and check, not a rule.
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