In my long career reporting on the subcultures of the western United States, and on the political and religious extremists who thrive here, a lot of the strange details I found during my reporting didn’t make it into the stories I wrote. In the case of my new book, Blazing Eye Sees All, however, one sparkling crystal I’d discovered in my research into a Mormon doomsday cult triggered the entire project.
In 2022, I wrote a book, When the Moon Turns to Blood, about the horrific tragedies surrounding Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow, a married Mormon couple who believed themselves living prophets—and left a trail of dead bodies behind them.
As I investigated how Daybell amassed power over others, I learned that in several spiritual meetings held in Idaho and Arizona, he would use a crystal pendulum—essentially, a spike-shaped crystal attached to a long chain—to find answers to his followers’ pressing questions.
The detail seemed odd: crystal pendulums are something I’d seen around New Age circles, not Mormon ones such as Daybell and Vallow’s. Within the New Age movement—a broad term for a set of spiritual practices involving astrology, crystals, and the occult, which gained traction in the western United States in the 1970s—some practitioners believe if you ask your “higher self” a question and then hold a crystal pendulum by its chain, the way the object swings will provide an answer. Say the crystal moves in a straight line; that answer might mean yes. If it swings in a circle, the answer is no.
That Daybell—an ultra-conservative Mormon who espoused far-right conspiracy theories—used this tool sparked my curiosity. In my hometown of Portland, Oregon, I can think of a dozen shops, within a 15-minute drive of my house, where pendulums, tarot cards, and crystal singing bowls are sold. None would stock a Book of Mormon.
This one curious detail sent me on a years-long journey to understand the sprawling influence of the New Age movement in America, what drives it, and why, it seems, it has historically appealed to women.
As I dove deeper into the modern New Age sects, I learned about the death of a woman named Amy Carlson. Carlson was known to her followers as “Mother God” and had been the leader of a cult-like spiritual group called Love Has Won. In April of 2021, the 45-year-old was found mummified in the group’s compound. Carlson believed she was the reincarnation of the Queen of Lemuria (like the legend of Atlantis, a supposedly vanished continent), Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, and Pocahontas, among others. She also claimed that Robin Williams, the deceased actor and comedian, was a spiritual guide for her and her followers.
In 2007, Carlson left her family behind to pursue her greater spiritual cause. By 2015 she had a loyal group of followers—many of whom were women of the modern-flower-child variety—dedicated to sharing Carlson’s ideas on Facebook live streams and selling crystals and homemade remedies. But by the end of her life, the group had fallen deep into QAnon’s far-right, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and become ardent supporters of Donald Trump.
The more I dug into what Love Has Won believed, the more I realized Carlson was simply the latest carrier of an intellectual torch that had been passed from generation to generation in the New Age movement. Tracing that path was fascinating—and surprising.
The torch was lit in the 1870s by the Russian spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, who claimed she had the ability to psychically communicate with a group of enlightened deities in the Himalayas who she referred to as “Masters” (a concept that has been adopted in many New Age belief systems). Blavatsky—who was never quiet about her disdain for biologists such as Charles Darwin—also developed an elaborate explanation of human evolution called “root races,” which declared the white race (as well as the mythical Lemurians) the most superior.
Blavatsky’s ideas influenced a string of New Age figures and offshoots throughout the 20th century, including the American Fascist activist William Dudley Pelley, who interpreted Blavatsky’s Masters as aliens and wove anti-Semitic conspiracies into her racist theories of evolution, packaging it as his own spirituality, called Soulcraft. In the early 1930s, a couple from Chicago, Guy and Edna Ballard—who had attended Soulcraft meetings—implemented Pelley’s and Blavatsky’s ideas into a new spiritual group called the I AM Temple.
In the 1970s, inspired by Blavatsky and I AM, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her husband claimed to be messengers from the Masters, founding a new religious organization known as the Summit Lighthouse (now the Church Universal and Triumphant) and issuing predictions for an imminent nuclear apocalypse. In 1989, an American cable-TV saleswoman named Judy “Zebra” Knight founded Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment—allegedly attended by Salma Hayek and Shirley MacLaine—around her claim that she could channel the teachings of a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior named Ramtha.
I was shocked to learn that not only is much of today’s New Age movement built on intellectual piggybacking, but it sits atop a deep legacy of pseudo-science, racism, anti-Semitism, and ultra-nationalism.
“It’s a very messy family tree that contemporary seekers might not fully be aware of,” Philip Deslippe, a historian of American religion, tells me. What’s more, “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.”
People like to say that the political spectrum is like a horseshoe, that if you go far enough to the right or far enough to the left, the ideas meet. Blazing Eye Sees All occurs at the exact point of collision.
Leah Sottile is a Portland, Oregon–based journalist and author
