Leah Sottile seeks fringe New Age believers in latest ‘Blazing Eye Sees All’

“Blazing Eye Sees All,” the second book by investigative journalist Leah Sottile, opens with tectonic shift and continental drift, mistaken as a continent disappeared. Because of the presence of lemurs in Madagascar, lemur fossils in India, but no lemurs elsewhere in Africa, British zoologist Phillip Lutley Sclater dubbed this hypothetical land “Lemuria.”

His theory was debunked, but Lemuria lived on as a mythological utopia for the New Age groups – such as “Love Has Won” – which “Blazing Eye Sees All” seeks to understand.

At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Northwest Passages will host Sottile in conversation with journalist Emma Epperly at the Steam Plant Rooftop. Sottile also hosted investigative podcasts Bundyville, Two Minutes Past Nine, Burn Wild, and Hush, which is about to release its second season.

Sottile had two points of entry into American New Age culture. In 2017, she was drawn to New Age ideas, and visited a New Age bookstore in Portland, where she purchased a tarot deck; tarot card names lend the book its structure and invite the reader to interpret.

“I would just flip a card every now and then, and think about them,” Sottile said. “And think about what they made me think about and what their history was, and I recognized that that was a little weird maybe. I grew up in Catholic schools where that would have been seen as a symbol of the occult.”

“When the Moon Turns to Blood,” Sottile’s first book, is about the mysterious deaths surrounding Lori Vallow and her husband, Chad Daybell.

“Chad Daybell would hold these study groups where he would sort of preach his ideas about Mormon scripture, and one thing that he would do at these meetings was he would use a crystal pendulum,” Sottile said.

Daybell would ask people if they have questions, and interpret the answer by the crystal’s movement.

“It sort of stopped me, because, to me, that’s something you would find in one of these New Age bookstores, and that’s very, very far from conservative Mormonism,” Sottile said. “I thought, well, that’s interesting that these worlds are intersecting a little bit, that items I might find in this, you know, sort of hippie Portland store are coming up in what I would consider to be religious extremism.”

Sottile wanted to test an axiom she’d heard over the years, reporting on extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures: “If you go far enough to the right or far enough to the left, the ideas start to be similar,” Sottile said. “So I thought, OK, then what is that point where they meet?”

Sottile stressed that “Blazing Eye Sees All” is a Western.

“I always like to remind people we have our own unique culture out here,” Sottile said. “I feel like that gets misunderstood a lot by reporters from other parts of the country.”

One of the central characters of the book, Amy Carlson, who was known as “Mother God” in “Love Has Won” was in Colorado, and spent extensive time in California. Sottile’s book detailed how common female leadership was in these New Age groups, but that power dynamic was complicated.

“If women are sort of excluded from what you might call traditional or more mainstream spiritualities, those women are going to create power for themselves … the New Age is really attractive for that, but it also allows people to claim power that they may or may not have,” Sottile said. “I think a lot of the women in this book are proof of that, that they all sort of broke away from something, staked a claim for themselves. I’m not sure that the things they decided to do with that power were beneficial for many people other than themselves.”

In the groups and leaders that Sottile cover in the book, she quickly found antisemitism, anti-science, and white supremacy woven into the history of New Age spirituality, as well as the present day.

In the book, Sottile quoted historian Philip Deslippe, “The same ingredients that allowed for parts of metaphysical spirituality to go fascist a hundred years ago are also the same ingredients that can allow it to go fascist today.”

The New Age leaders Sottile wrote about, including Carlson, have always sparked a lot of attention. In fact, Carlson appeared with family, former and current followers on the TV show, Dr. Phil. Sottile, who interviewed multiple family members for this book, wanted to approach the story differently.

“As a journalist, to come in and see if there’s a way to kind of hose off the sensationalism and see the story for what it is, and see what other people are missing, right?” Sottile said. “We live in a strange news environment, so not everybody can write about what happened. The people who will write about what happened to Amy Carlson will be more tabloid-style journalists, but is there something bigger there that we’re missing?”

The New Age messages are playing out in real time. Sottile pointed to Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman” from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.

“He was saying, the reason they were there was for this rule, these New Age spiritual ideas that he had,” Sottile said. “And this is somebody who had stormed the capitol to help try to overthrow the government.”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also appears in the book.

“A 2021 study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that one alternative health influencer named Erin Elizabeth – best known for her blog ‘Health Nut News’ – was among the top 12 biggest disseminators of anti-vaccination rhetoric,” Sottile wrote. “On Instagram, she posted about the Gates microchip theory alongside antisemitic memes about a Jewish cabal running the world. (No. 2 on that list? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.).”

Sottile still had her tarot cards, but she viewed them as more of a prompt for her thoughts rather than predicting her future.

“I do wonder what it’s like to believe,” Sottile said. “I ask a lot of people questions about that, and I think I still see myself as a seeker, not necessarily a believer, though.”