Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age

Journalist Sottile (When the Moon Turns to Blood) offers an ambitious study of Love Has Won, a spiritual group and alleged cult. The narrative tracks the rise of the group’s leader Amy Carlson, a former McDonald’s manager who claimed to be “a reincarnated... queen of a continent called Lemuria” (as well as a reincarnated Jesus and Marilyn Monroe). “Spending more and more time online” following her 2005 divorce, Carlson mainlined conspiracies about angels and aliens, Sottile writes, eventually seeing herself as “a major player” in America’s coming “spiritual upliftment” and building a personal following. Sottile doesn’t shy away from Love Has Won’s intrinsic shock value, including Carlson’s claim she spoke to deceased “Masters” like Prince and Robin Williams and the sensational 2021 discovery of Carlson’s mummified and enshrined body, which had turned blue due to her intake of colloidal silver (the group touted the substance as “one of the highest medicines on the planet”). But Sottile also provides a meticulous ideological genealogy of Carlson’s new age influences, including 19th-century medium Helena Blavatsky—who likewise communed with “Masters”—and the long-held new age fixation on the lost civilization of Lemuria (derived from a 19th-century theory about lemurs). Leaving no crystal unturned, Sottile unearths intriguing similarities across disparate fringe groups (near-constant antisemitism, frequent female leadership) that bolster her thesis that cults are a feature, not a bug, of American spiritual life, functioning as an outlet for repressed women enmeshed in patriarchal belief structures. It’s a must-read for cult obsessives. (Mar.)