Portland Journalist Researched How Cults Exploit Spirituality for “Blazing Eye Sees All”
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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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.wweek.com/arts/books/2025/03/25/portland-journalist-researched-how-cults-exploit-spirituality-for-blazing-eye-sees-all/.
