BookBrowse Reviews Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile

BookBrowse:

Placing the notorious Love Has Won cult in the greater context of American Spiritualist and New Age movements, Leah Sottile's gripping, disquieting Blazing Eye Sees All is a skeleton key for our current moment.

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Leah Sottile's Blazing Eye Sees All tells the story of Love Has Won, the cult started in the mid-2000s by Amy Carlson, a woman who called herself "Mother God" and claimed to be the reincarnated queen of the ancient kingdom of Lemuria, and whose charismatic online presence recruited a number of followers. The group's daily YouTube livestreams revealed their conspiracy theories, paranoia, and one shocking incident wherein a child was repeatedly locked in a closet. An appearance on Dr. Phil in 2020 raised the movement's profile further, even as Carlson's physical condition deteriorated. Carlson died in 2021, and her corpse was mummified by her followers.

But Blazing Eye also tells the stories of Helena Blavatsky, a Russian-American mystic who influenced Western esotericism despite accusations of being a charlatan; of Guy and Edna Ballard, founders of the "I AM" Movement and defendants in a landmark fraud trial; and of JZ Knight, who found fame and fortune (and devoted followers) by "channeling" an ancient warrior named Ramtha.

These are all different stories, but in a very real way they're all the same story: bizarre yet seemingly harmless beliefs in manifestation, reincarnation, and lost underwater kingdoms giving way to conspiratorial thought, virulent bigotry, and sinister cult tactics and abuse. There once was a time when people mostly thought they could shrug these believers off, humoring their calls on late-night radio and gawking at them on daytime TV; today, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Sottile does highlight the absurdity of Love Has Won's belief system—it's kind of unavoidable when said belief system venerates Robin Williams as a galactic spiritual ambassador—but she doesn't gawk. Nor does she fall into the common sensationalist trap of presenting Carlson (or any other cult leader) as an otherworldly font of charisma. In fact, the cult leaders profiled in Blazing Eye Sees All are all too human: many of them try to escape past trauma by reinventing themselves as beings of divine significance, their ego and greed ultimately victimizing others in turn. Which is not to say that she lets them off easy—she just sees them as a symptom of a greater sickness.

Blazing Eye Sees All is especially illuminating when illustrating how the American New Age movement is connected to the far right. New Age belief is often coded as left-wing and hippie-ish (you don't usually see Young Republicans getting their tarot read), and the turn of some "granola" types towards reactionary conservatism and COVID skepticism was seen by many as a bizarre, recent twist. But in fact, various New Age movements throughout the past century—from the "I AM" Movement in the 1930s and its explicitly nationalist ideology, to JZ Knight and her racist outbursts in the guise of "Ramtha" starting in the late 1970s—are not unlike what might be referred to as the "alt-right" today.

Sottile draws a line from Love Has Won and other present-day disseminators of conspiracy theories, like the QAnon Shaman, all the way back to the 19th century with Helena Blavatsky, whose belief system was rife with race science and inspired Nazi occultists, and William Dudley Pelley, a fanatical antisemite whose near-death experience inspired him to create a fascist paramilitary organization called the American Silver Legion, which aimed to overthrow the federal government in 1936. By the time Sottile observes a New Age shop in Mount Shasta, California, where healing crystals sit side-by-side with COVID-19 disinformation and books asking if Adolf Hitler saved the human race, the point is made. "Even New Ageism, with all its promises of being something different, was in fact just as redpilled as the rest of the country," Sottile writes. "This was the aisle where believers became radicals."

When Helena Blavatsky was confronted after a failed parlor trick, she responded, unfazed, "What is one to do when in order to rule men it is necessary to deceive them?" But Blazing Eye Sees All demonstrates that New Age cult leaders can't be so clearly defined as opportunistic charlatans pulling the wool over the eyes of their followers. In our post-truth era, lack of consensus cuts both ways. Did Amy Carlson truly believe that she was the reincarnated princess of the lost continent of Lemuria (see Beyond the Book), or was she a mere grifter who wanted to feel like the most important person on Earth? Past a certain point—past the abused children, the paranoia—does it really matter?

This review first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.