BLAZING EYE SEES ALL

A disorienting journey to the outré fringes of the New Age.

“The aliens are coming. The Earth is ending. The aliens will take us to a new planet, and we can build a new society. How awesome does that sound?” So says, mockingly, the abandoned son of Amy Carlson, who called herself Mother God and surrounded herself with followers in a group called Love Has Won. Not only was she God—and Jesus, and Marilyn Monroe, and Cleopatra—but she also had, in a previous incarnation, ruled the lost continent of Lemuria, the invention of a 19th-century quack that just won’t go away. Given that, as journalist Sottile documents, about half of Americans believe in ghosts and the onetime existence of Atlantis, to say nothing of space aliens, Carlson found easy pickings among lost souls. The New Age, as Sottile writes, stretches back into olden times (one landmark, by her lights, being Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking), and charlatans have been around forever. But Carlson tapped into something different: Apart from swilling down vast quantities of colloidal silver, supposedly a miracle cure, while chugging tequila, she linked her oddball metaphysics to other cultural threads, including QAnon. (Not for nothing did the “Q Shaman” of Jan. 6, 2021, fame declare that the riot altered “the quantum realm.”) So it was that she traded in tropes such as anti-vaxxing and 9/11-as-inside-job and performed psychic “surgeries” for a bargain-basement price of $77.77, declaring that she was guided by Robin Williams, the late comedian, an ascended master in the spirit world. (She also advised looking directly at the sun, “one of Our most powerful healing tools.”) Things ended badly for Carlson: Her diet killed her, and by the time authorities found her she was starting to mummify. Her followers are still out there, though, plying their eldritch trade.

A fascinating look into the fun-house mirror of cults and the occult.