Skip to main content
The cultures of fear and vulnerability that have scored the scenes of our mediascape have also amplified ideologies based on mythos and the sacrosanct whims of tarot and tea leaves. Within this sliver of New Age resurrection, sub-beliefs have boiled over, revealing hard-to-fathom cult communities and a legion of reincarnated prophetesses. It is in this convoluted realm that notorious groups like Love Has Won and the Washington-based Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment were given root to grow. It’s also been the impetus for Portland author and journalist Leah Sottile to dig deeper into the trappings of the New Age movement’s most egregious perpetrators, both historically and those still swindling.
“In times of fear, you could be exploited,” Sottile says. “There are people waiting in the wings to take your money and sell you a miracle cure, and that is not unique to this moment in history. That is the American story.”
Sottile has made a career out of deep-dive journalism that mines the minutiae of power, policing, class and labor. Her byline has occupied the pages of Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine and Playboy, and she has also hosted a slew of podcasts, including the National Magazine Award-nominated Bundyville.
In Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age (Grand Central Publishing, 304 pages, $30), Sottile drills down on how the blueprints of New Age ideologies have been manipulated, obscured and abused.
The shocking discovery of Love Has Won leader Amy Carlson’s blue, mummified body in a bed adorned with Christmas lights at a rural Colorado home thrust the group into the national spotlight in 2021. JZ Knight has channeled the spirit of a 35,000-year-old male Lemurian warrior called Ramtha for decades, generating herself a fortune in the process through a huge network of believers.
Anchored through these contemporary lenses, Sottile dissects the origins of the extreme spiritual ideologies that helped to birth groups like Love Has Won, while articulating a gripping piece of narrative nonfiction that settles in the dark recesses of the reader’s capacity for understanding the often unbelievable.
Sottile threads her story with a sharp needle, contextualizing the evolution of ideologies that Carlson co-opted for Love Has Won as having morphed from 19th century American spiritualists like the Fox sisters and the Eddy brothers (all mediums for the dead) as well as Madame Blavatsky, a mystic and founder of the Theosophical Society. Carlson had even claimed to have lived as Blavatsky in one of her reincarnations, to say nothing of her routine channeling of the guidance of “Ascended Master” Robin Williams. Yes, that Robin Williams.
Spiritual vacancy, in every case, appeared a throughway for those professing divine powers to indoctrinate followers, typically relieving them of portions of their income in the process.
As she wrote, Sottile thought about what separated those who fell victim to the grifts and what they had in common.
“I think it was clear to me that everyone who was involved with Love Has Won specifically, they were in a kind of crisis,” Sottile says. “There was this component of vulnerability, but there was also a willingness to entertain edgy ideas.”
An annual Chapman University study that Sottile cites aims to delineate the “Survey of American Fears” and to help clarify the murky zone around fears beyond Americans’ control: nuclear war, biological warfare and, as Sottile writes, that fear to die right now and yet also the fear of being alive. This coalescence of horrors seemed to will Sottile’s book into being.
“This book couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t experienced some seriously fearful times over the last few years,” Sottile says. “Your fear can be an endless abyss. It’s important to realize how that makes you malleable in the hands of other people.”
The investigative aplomb that Sottile has summoned with both Blazing Eye Sees All as well as in her debut narrative nonfiction book, When the Moon Turns to Blood—a treatise on far-right Mormon extremism—perhaps not surprisingly takes a toll on her everyday worldview.
“I have to be really intentional about why I’m doing the work I’m doing,” Sottile says. “It’s an interesting time to be an extremism reporter. I’m always questioning whether it’s the right decision.”
SEE IT: Leah Sottile at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com. 7 pm Thursday, March 27. Free.