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Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
by Leah Sottile
Book Reviewed by:An investigation of the New Age movement in America that aims to understand its appeal to women and the self-proclaimed prophetesses, like Love Has Won's Amy Carlson, who've created kingdoms for themselves within it.
Known for deep dives into true crime, extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures, journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward American New Age culture. Today, tarot cards, astrology and crystals are everywhere — from Instagram and TikTok, to upscale boutiques and pricey wellness retreats. Sottile investigates how the recent surge of interest in New Age ideas speaks to a culture that is woven into the very fabric of America, and how self-professed gurus like Love Has Won's Mother God and the mysterious channeler Ramtha have built devout followings because of it. For more than a century, this pastel-colored world of love, light and enlightenment has been built upon a foundation of conspiracies, antisemitism, nationalism and a rejection of science.
In Blazing Eye Sees All, Sottile seeks to understand the quest for New Age spirituality in an era of fear that has made us open to anything that claims to bring relief — from war, the climate crisis, COVID 19, or the myriad of other issues we face. At the same time, she attempts to draw a line between truly helpful, healing ideas and snake oil. The new New Age is everywhere, and Sottile helps us sort through the crystals to find true clarity.
Chapter 1
Two hundred million years ago, the Earth was like a house with all of its furniture piled into one corner. The seven continents of our planet were, back then, just one. Australia was shoved into Antarctica; India flopped nearby. South America fit into the elbow crook of Africa, and the land that would one day become the island of Madagascar was trapped in the midst of it all.
The continental plates that act as the foundation of the world began to move, as they are wont to do. As one dragged over another, volcanic magma burbled up from the planet's angry core, rising toward the Earth's surface, searing apart that giant mass of land into jagged new pieces. Those pieces drifted. For eons upon eons upon eons, they kept moving as the planet underwent a great reorganization.
As everything drifted, Madagascar, a wisp of land, spun like a feather in the wind until it settled, finally, 250 miles off the eastern coast of Africa.
Millions more years passed.
In the 1860s a British zoologist ...
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... But in fact, various New Age movements throughout the past century are not unlike what might be referred to as the "alt-right" today. Sottile draws a line from Love Has Won and QAnon back to the 19th century with Helena Blavatsky, whose belief system was rife with race science and inspired Nazi occultists...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Jeff Guinn, author of Manson, The Road to Jonestown, and Waco
I have never read a better - or more entertaining - analysis of so-called New Age Spirituality and its self-anointed prophets than Lisa Sottile's Blazing Eye Sees All. In this book, even the infamous Love Has Won cult doesn't win, but readers do. See for yourself. Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts
Leah Sottile is one of our foremost chroniclers of American extremism, and in Blazing Eye Sees All she reveals the conspiracism, fakery, and abuses of power embedded in New Age culture. A fascinating, unsettling, and, yes, enlightening investigation of an extremist movement operating in plain sight.Amy Carlson, the leader of the Love Has Won cult, claimed to have been many different figures in past lives—Jesus, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few—but one of her most eyebrow-raising claims was that she was once the Queen of Lemuria, an ancient, hyper-advanced kingdom that originated the human race before being destroyed in a war against Atlantis that caused both kingdoms to sink to the ocean floor. Perhaps surprisingly, this "woo-woo" theory has a long history independent of Carlson. And it all originated from a scientific article about lemurs.
In 1864, a zoologist named Philip Sclater had a theory. Lemurs mostly live on Madagascar, an island off the coast of southern Africa. But while lemur fossils had ...
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