Photo: Courtesy of HBO
Amy Carlson wanted to be special. She tried astrology, and she tried men — angry, violent, useless men. One held a knife to her throat, which forced her to get a restraining order. One fathered her first child, but the relationship didn’t last. She married another man and gave birth to a daughter, and yet she was still restless. In 2005 she got divorced, and she delivered her last child, Aidan, the same year. That’s when she saw the archangel Michael. The great being was visible above Aidan’s crib, and he had a message for her alone. “It’s time,” he told her, and then he disappeared.
When Carlson told this story much later, she said she had no time to ask the angel any questions. Instead she looked to the internet, writes journalist Leah Sottile in her new book, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. Carlson began posting on a website called lightworkers.org, where she claimed that her spiritual “guides” had informed her of her true mission on earth. “They are insisting that I move out of 3d completely and begin living fully in 5th dimension … I have been balancing both,” she wrote, adding that she wanted to stop living in an “illusion.” Carlson’s posts “read like they were written by two different Amys,” Sottile observes: One had a purpose, and the other cried in the shower. Carlson also said online that a disembodied voice told her that she would become president of the United States. “I am choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and to step into my Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be,” she posted. Then, during a family dinner at a Mexican restaurant, she stood up and said she had to go. “I didn’t think she’d just leave and never come back,” her sister told Sottile, but that’s exactly what she did.
Leaving the illusion meant leaving her job managing a McDonald’s, her children, and her life, but never the internet. She liked to post videos of the Crestone, Colorado, home she shared with her new “twin flame,” Amerith WhiteEagle; Sottile writes that she soon began signing off as “Mother God.” WhiteEagle was Father God for a while, and after they split she kept posting, splicing cryptic decrees with wonder tales. She told viewers that she’d lived hundreds of lives and had inhabited the mythical continent of Lemuria before it sank into the sea. “The Entire [9/11] truth, as well as The UFO Conspiracy Cover~Up, Must Be Revealed immediately,” she said in one typical pronouncement. Offline, she collected new Father Gods and new followers, and they became a small but loyal congregation. The group launched a website called Love Has Won, which proclaimed her the Mother of All Creation and offered “psychic surgeries,” though it would become clear that it was Carlson who needed help. By 2020, she was sick, and soon she lost the ability to walk. Her skin turned blue from the daily consumption of colloidal silver, and she lost so much weight that “her collarbones stuck out from her body like razors,” Sottile writes. Her followers refused to get her medical help when she asked for it.
On April 28, 2021, Crestone police entered the Love Has Won home, where they discovered her followers, a bed strewn with twinkle lights, and, on the bed, a slight lump. Carlson’s body was “swaddled in an REI sleeping bag,” Sottile writes, her skin “sparkled,” and her eyelids were painted with brightly colored blue and green glitter. “Mother God had been mummified,” Sottile reports. Elsewhere in the house, someone had taped up an image of Carlson’s head photoshopped onto the body of Jesus and above it wrote one name: “Aidan.”
A lot of mothers cry in the shower, as Carlson did, and most don’t abandon their children. Maybe she was in psychosis, but that explanation is unsatisfactory. It’s no stranger to hear angels than it is to listen, as many Christians do, for the still small voice of God. Maybe she invented her visions to control her flock, but we can’t get inside her head. Instead Sottile links Carlson to old and often reactionary ideas that are gaining new traction. New Age spirituality has always been a vehicle for the radical, but in the Trump era, the fringe is no longer so obscure. Some New Age women are spreading pseudoscience and far-right views while coalescing around Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his master, Trump — just as Carlson did before she died. Her earthly works and ultimate fate are revelatory, if not the way she intended. Like men, women desire meaning and value, even power. She wanted authority, and a version of motherhood on her own terms, and it consumed her.
Christians believed for centuries that palms bled, saints levitated, and visionaries walked the earth. A woman could transcend her sexual status — and with it, motherhood — and achieve some authority through extraordinary spirituality. Before Mary of Egypt flew and frightened the monk Zosimus, she renounced her carnal proclivities for the solitude of the desert. Margery Kempe, the English mystic, said that she would rather “have eaten and drunk the ooze and muck in the gutter” than have sex with her husband. She suffered through 14 pregnancies before he agreed to a celibate marriage, which allowed her to roam medieval Europe on pilgrimage. But Kempe was an exception: Women who stepped out of place could expect to be punished. Sottile recalls the legend of Pope Joan, who dressed as a man so she could be educated and rose through the ranks of the church before she “quite suddenly dropped to the ground and gave birth to a child.” In one version of the story, the faithful stone her to death for her sins.
Women may have stopped flying, but they still needed miracles. Sottile writes that in the Victorian era, women could transcend their inferior status by channeling spirits. “Spiritualism and women’s rights were intertwined,” she adds, sometimes in dramatic fashion. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, “strange rappings” would shake “the very table where suffragists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments,” Sottile notes. When Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society a few decades later, she positioned herself as the chief spiritual authority of a new religious movement. She was an odd figure who’d fled her much older husband in a search for esoteric truth, and her tales bore a touch of the grandiose: She spoke of ascended masters, and ancient wisdom, and a great spiritual destiny for herself. Yet her philosophy was little more than a mishmash of Hindu, Buddhist, and Spiritualist thought, and though she empowered herself, she reinforced rather than subverted the convictions of her time. In 1888, she published The Secret Doctrine, which identified Lemuria as the origin of the “most superior” Aryan “root-race.”
Her belief in white supremacy was not unusual for the era, though as Sottile points out, “there’s simply no way to see the idea of Aryans as a superior race as not racist.” She was also a proven fraud. Nevertheless, her ideas “laid the foundation for so many New Age practitioners to come,” Sottile argues, adding that New Age ideas attracted thousands of women in the 1970s and 1980s — just as Spiritualism did in the 19th century and often for the same reasons. Suffrage extended certain political rights to women, but it didn’t change the fact that most Protestant denominations would not ordain them and Catholic women could not become priests. In a country dominated by Christianity, many women found that their limited church roles mirrored their legal and sexual restrictions, but New Age thought “offered a true spiritual alternative — a path that prized personal insight over the entrenched ideas of spiritual leaders,” Sottile writes. New Age women searched for power within the self.
Who can blame them? Why be Kempe, who said she forced herself to have sex with her husband, if a woman can be Mother God and have sex with whoever she wants? But Mother God freed no one, not even herself. She ruled her fiefdom with all the sensitivity of the common patriarch. In Sottile’s account, Carlson drank all day and berated her followers until she died. She’s not alone, either.
By 2011, Sottile writes, the nexus of conspiracy and New Age belief had become so pronounced that experts coined a term for it. “Conspirituality” thrives on social media, and the rise of Trump has only supercharged it. Many of its most prominent voices are women like Carlson, who listen to their inner voices to the exclusion of all others, and they tilt, often, to the far right. A disdain for expertise and the quest for bodily purity has fused with New Age pseudoscience, as Sottile documents: When COVID struck, the New Age legend J.Z. Knight posted anti-vaccine signs on the gates of her compound. And Blavatsky’s mystical race science hardly disappeared with her death. Knight, an erstwhile rodeo queen who says she can channel a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior, despises Jews and Mexicans alike.
Not only did Carlson say that she had been Blavatsky in a prior life, she put her own slant on the notion of Aryan superiority. A man who knew Carlson and her group during their sojourn in Dunsmuir, California, told Sottile that he was drawn in by her antisemitism, though he said that her prejudice “wasn’t as deep” as his own. Sottile later writes that in one video, the last Father God “repeatedly used a racial slur for Black people,” and the group’s livestreams “constantly called back to their beliefs in ‘the cabal,’” a common antisemitic trope. Trump “is a massive part of this plan, he’s a part of the divine mission,” a member said at one point, and Carlson told everyone the president had been her father when she lived in Lemuria. Followers read “Q updates” on air.
The self is not boundless, and a woman who delves within her own mind can trap herself there. Carlson was born in 1975, amid consciousness-raising and the International Women’s Year, but she was no more liberated than Kempe. She was a prisoner of herself. She could not conceive of a life without hierarchy, ordered by race and by gender. Her sacred motherhood only remade the traditional family in her own image, and she was the power, the violent heart of it all. She could give the orders, and she could cast her children out. Love Has Won became as authoritarian as its mother. A convert who Sottile calls Ben spent two days with the group before they gave him a drink that may have been drugged and told him to start walking into the Colorado wilderness. A local resident found him naked and dehydrated and drove him to the hospital. Carlson’s whims could be petty, too. When a former Father God failed to make her the dinner she requested, she whined. “My vision was chicken parmesan,” she told him. “I didn’t say meatballs. I love meatballs. But I didn’t fucking say that! Chicken. Parmesan.”
Toward the end of Blazing Eye, Sottile speaks to Carlson’s eldest son, Cole, who observes, “In my head I really don’t see that huge of a difference between the megachurch I used to have to go to and Amy’s cult. It’s just a matter of magnitude, acceptance, and success.” The director of an HBO docuseries on Love Has Won told W magazine that the group owed its popularity to a broken health-care system, a characterization Sottile disputes. “It overlooked that Love Has Won was based on a legacy of belief in America, and thrived from a structure in this country that allows people to lie if they say it’s in the name of their God,” she writes. Carlson and her spiritual predecessors “became enlightened on their own terms, then they offered that enlightenment as a product.”
Now that Carlson is gone — ascended, in the words of her loyalists — only the lie remains. Conspirituality is everywhere. In America you can believe anything, and you can sell just about anything, too. “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known,” the apostle Paul told the Corinthians. We are all Paul by our mirrors, looking for the truth, wanting to be seen. But the glass is cracking. Behind it there’s only a wall.
