Minnesota Is Not by Chance: the Karmic Return of the Unresolved Foundations of the United States

Neptune–Saturn at 0° Aries and the Foundational Wound Now Emerging

Dakota Fall, an illustration by Jamie Hewlett, depicts an Indigenous figure from the Dakota War of 1862, with falling leaves and the downturned head of a horse - the symbols of impending defeat.

There are historical moments when time ceases to move forward in a straight line and begins to fold back onto itself. Not as mechanical repetition, but as conscious return. The past resurfaces not to be reenacted, but to be finally confronted. Such moments arise when what has been silenced, rendered invisible, or violently repressed can no longer sustain the structure built upon it.

From an astrological perspective, the definitive ingress of Neptune into Aries on January 26, 2026 - followed by its exact conjunction with Saturn on February 20, 2026, at the zero degree of the zodiac - marks one of these threshold moments.

This is no ordinary transit. It is an unprecedented historical event: never before, in the entirety of documented human history, have Saturn and Neptune met at the absolute beginning of the zodiacal cycle. At the point where everything begins. Where identity, impulse, and direction are born.

What is known, however, is that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions bring about the collapse of structures - as was the case with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

When this unprecedented event is examined through the lens of the astrological chart of the United States, its symbolism ceases to be abstract and becomes visceral - above all because it directly activates the country’s IC, the Imum Coeli, or “Bottom of the Sky.” In mundane astrology, the IC represents the invisible foundation of a nation: its historical roots, its symbolic ground, that upon which everything is built yet rarely questioned. To touch the IC is not to touch the surface of events; it is to touch a fundamental axis.

And here the unavoidable question arises:

why is this basal point in the chart of the United States being activated again now?

And why does this activation manifest so violently in Minnesota?

Minnesota is not just any place in the American imagination. The recent events there - deaths during state actions (ICE), open conflicts between official narratives and recorded images, a pervasive sense of moral and institutional collapse - do not arise in a vacuum. They emerge precisely as Neptune returns to the same Aries degree that activated the U.S. IC in 1862, during the Dakota War: the moment when the American state broke treaties, carried out mass executions, and expelled Indigenous peoples from their lands, consolidating territorial sovereignty through institutionalized violence.

This is not historical coincidence. It is structural resonance.The same point in the chart.The same foundation being struck.The same wound demanding review.

Mní Sóta: Sky-Tinted Water and the Memory of the Land

The very name of the state comes from the Dakota language: Mní Sóta, “sky-tinted water.” Lakes, rivers, reflections, the permeability between earth and sky. A profoundly Neptunian image, revealing how those peoples related to the world: not through domination, but correspondence; not through possession, but spiritual belonging. This poetic relationship with the land was violently crushed by a colonial project that never repaired the massacre, expulsion, and erasure of these peoples. The poetry of the name remains. The wound of the territory remains as well.

The Dakota people - like so many Indigenous peoples of the Americas - held a relationship with the land fundamentally incompatible with colonial logic. Land was not a commodity, but a living entity. Space was not a fixed border, but a relational field. Spirituality was not an institution, but a direct experience, inseparable from nature. This way of being is also distinctly Neptunian - and it was precisely this that the European colonial project, followed by the American state, could not tolerate.

Expansion demanded Saturn in its harshest form: imposed law, centralized authority, exemplary punishment, violence legitimized by religious and civilizational narratives. Democracy was never universal; it was always selective. Rights were never evenly distributed. Humanity itself was conditional. What now appears as institutional violence against immigrants is not a system failure, but its logical continuation - the same gesture of exclusion, now directed at different bodies.

1862–2026: the Same Wound, Another Octave

The most sensitive - and most revealing - point of this reading lies in the synchronic dynamic between Neptune and Saturn in 1862 and now, in 2026.

In 1862, during the Dakota War, transiting Neptune had just entered 0° Aries and was already retrograding. It was a Neptune of revision, moral confusion, dissolution of ethical boundaries, and loss of collective orientation. Neptune was not advancing; it was returning to zero - to the point of origin of identity and action. War emerged within this foggy field, where the Arian impulse merged with Neptunian dissociation.

At the same time - and this is the decisive fact - transiting Saturn was in Virgo, in exact conjunction with the natal Neptune of the United States, also in Virgo. State authority was fused with the way the country already symbolically operated its natal Neptune: a Neptune pragmatically shaped, moralized, placed in service of order, efficiency, and the so-called “civilizing mission.” In this context, violence against Indigenous peoples could be rationalized, administered, and legitimized as legal, economic, and moral necessity. Saturn gave institutional form to the fog; Neptune dissolved ethics.

In 2026, the theme returns - but not in the same octave. Neptune once again enters Aries from Pisces, as it did in 1862. The crucial difference lies not in Neptune, but in Saturn. Now Saturn also comes from Pisces and enters Aries in conjunction with transiting Neptune, at the zero degree of the zodiac. No longer is spirit subjected to law. Law is now confronted by spirit. No longer is violence masked as order. Order itself is unmasked in its violence.

The synchronicity deepens inescapably when we observe that Neptune retrogrades in 2026 at the very same degree at which it retrograded in 1862, differing by only a few minutes of arc, after completing a full zodiacal cycle of roughly 165 years. In both cycles, this retrogradation occurs immediately after July 4th, the peak date of the American founding myth. Independence is celebrated - and immediately placed under symbolic suspension. Origins demand revision.

It is here that Chiron assumes a central role. In astrology, Chiron represents the wound that never healed and returns to demand consciousness. In the U.S. chart, Chiron is in return, activating this same Arian zone. If Neptune dissolves and reveals, Chiron hurts. It marks the wound of oppression as the foundation of power, the wound of legitimized violence, the wound of an identity constructed against the Other.

The Sabian symbol for 3° Aries - triggered by retrograde Neptune - synthesizes this with disturbing clarity: “The profile of a man is revealed as the outline of his country.” The ego confused with the nation. Personal identity fused with territory. The belief that the State is an extension of the “self” - and that the Other represents a threat. In 1862, this inflamed identification produced Indigenous massacre. In 2026, it returns to be exposed - and no longer easily sustained.

It is within this context that recent events in Minnesota cease to appear episodic. The tragic deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in actions involving federal ICE agents, and the immediate attempt by state power to fabricate false narratives - contradicted by widely circulated images and videos - become concrete expressions of this symbolic return. Neptune governs images, visual records, that which escapes control of official narrative. When power asserts one version and images reveal another, the veil is torn. The farce no longer holds.

The difference from the past is not the absence of tension. It is the fact that the curtains covering the theatre of horrors are being ripped away. The current transits no longer sustain institutionalized lies, moral corruption disguised as legality, violence justified by efficiency and security. What could once be managed through discourse now becomes visible, unavoidable, exposed.

What collapses is not merely a policy, a government, or a national narrative. It is a form of consciousness. It is the dominance of a Virgoan rational mind severed from the heart - technical logic without compassion - separated from the Piscean dimension of unconditional love, from the recognition that no legitimate order exists without humanity. When calculation replaces care, when law replaces relationship, when efficiency replaces life, the result is not civilization - it is organized barbarism.

Thus, the wound returning now is not only the wound of war. It is the wound of dehumanization. The wound of a humanity that repeatedly chooses domination over recognition, exclusion over integration, control over love. This wound runs through Indigenous genocide, colonialism, slavery, violence against immigrants, and every form by which power seeks to justify the negation of the Other.

What these cycles make non-negotiable is simple: it is no longer possible to continue like this. It is no longer possible to sustain abysmal levels of consciousness beneath the appearance of order. It is no longer possible to speak of sovereignty, democracy, or security while human life remains conditional.

History does not return by chance. It returns because it was never resolved.

And now it demands resolution - not through force, but through what has always been denied: unconditional love, the intrinsic dignity of every being, and the courage to acknowledge what was done.

Flavio Graff