Book review: Leah Sottile’s ‘Blazing Eye Sees All’ examines life of self-proclaimed Mother God, a look into fringe religious leaders
Leah Sottile likes to follow the fringes of American life.
She’ll find a less traveled path made of myths, conspiracy theories and wandering faith seekers. She chases those looking for love in all the wrong places and follows them to the edge of reason, looking out into the abyss and trying to find out why anyone would jump into the void.
Her latest work, “Blazing Eye Sees All,” explores the history of New Age folklore in America that has led prophets to profits and ruined thousands of lives of people just looking for a place a belong.
It follows “When the Moon Turns to Blood,” Sottile’s look at how Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell became celebrity end-times authors and cold-blooded child killers amid Mormon doctrine.
“Blazing Eye Sees All” follows the dark fairytale rise of New Age mythology in America, and how it led to the rise of groups like the itinerant Love Has Won and Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in Yelm.
There’s less gruesomeness than “When the Moon Turns to Blood,” but no less darkness. One night, I read a chapter of “Blazing Eye” before bed and had nightmares – like any good horror story.
What’s fascinating about Sottile’s work is that it’s based in science, geography and sociology. She’s able to follow a string of stories, springing from continental drift and Darwin, which stray away from original discoveries and evolve into fanciful myths that have evolved through three centuries, embraced by generations and that people continue to believe today.
It begins, like good stories do, long ago in a faraway land, where lemurs lived on an island, but fossils turned up hundreds of miles away on mainland India. How did that happen? More than 50 years before the first theories of continental drift were published, a British zoologist opined that there once existed a lost continent that connected India and the island of Madagascar.
He called it Lemuria.
Over the years, Lemuria gained traction as a mythical place where anything could have happened. There could have been people called Lemurians. It became the subject of folklore, even drawing speculation of wars with another sunken society, Atlantis.
It’s a fascinating story of places that never existed which became the dreams of vast numbers of people wanting a better place than where they lived their desperate lives.
As P.T. Barnum was proving there’s a sucker born every minute, there entered the preachers, psychics and prophets looking to cash in on those searching for hope.
Sottile takes us on a ride through the spiritualism of the 19th century, channelers and mediums on traveling shows where you could talk to your dead granny for the price of admission. Crowds would gather to watch sisters Kate and Maggie Fox summon knocking ghosts or books by self-proclaimed psychic Helena Blavatsky. Madama Blavatsky expounded on the story of Lumeria, where the Lemerian people served as the root of enlightened vision. Did she mention they were white Aryans?
There’s a lot of racism and antisemitism in New Age lore, it turns out, adopted sometimes word for word by people calling themselves Nazis or Q-Anon.
She also channeled one St. Germaine, who she crowned a master to enlightenment.
The Lumeria and St. Germaine story carried into the 1930s as part of something called the IM movement by named Guy Ballard. Ballard claimed to be immune to sickness and could not die. After he died, his wife Edna took over preaching to the growing group.
And she added merch.
The U.S. government thought this was going too far and tried to prosecute Edna Ballard for fraud. She took her case all the way to the Supreme Court – and won. The justices ruled the First Amendment protected any religion – as long as people actually believed it. The beliefs didn’t have to make sense.
This would open the gates to a tax-exempt religious free market that would lead to Ramtha and Love Has Won, internet movements of the 21st century, making its women leaders wealthy.
Sottile’s main narrative follows the life of Amy Carlson from frustrated McDonald’s manager to Mother God of Love Has Won.
Carlson ruled an online empire that inspired thousands to leave their families and lives. No longer relying on just St. Germain, her stable of masters included none other than the ghost of Robin Williams – comedian, actor and apparently eternal holy spirit. They waited for alien angels in UFOs to take them to a better place.
Amy Carlson died in 2021, withered of anorexia, alcohol abuse and her skin turned blue by ingesting a deadly concoction called silver colloidal, a so-called cure-all the group made and sold for hundreds of dollars a bottle.
Amy’s followers claimed she resurrected, ascended to heaven – does that story sound familiar – and continue to preach today. Silver colloidal is still available for sale, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s attempt to halt it.
“Blazing Eye” weaves together a tapestry of New Age fables and their path through hundreds of years to the present, some that live today through JZ Knight, famous for channel the spirit of a 25,000-year-old warrior named Ramtha at her place in Yelm, Washington.
The moral of the story?
If you meet someone talking about St. Germain (a person, not a liqueur), Lumeria, Atlantis, UFOs, following them to go to heaven, or if someone tries to get you to drink silver, run like hell.