American New Age culture isn’t all crystals and Tarot cards. A New World Order? The Aryan race? Alien-human hybrids? Throughout history, New Age belief systems have so often been blended with wild, and sometimes dangerous, conspiracy theories that academics have coined the term “conspirituality.” This week, we journey into murky waters of Love Has Won, a New Age spiritual group whose leader passed away in 2021. By the time authorities found her body that April, she had been dead for weeks. Her followers had camped with her body, slept with it in tents, and crossed state lines to fashion a shine out of her mummified corpse. We’re joined by journalist and author Leah Sottile. Leah’s book Blazing Eye Sees All investigates American New Age culture and examines how self-proclaimed prophetesses, like Love Has Won’s Amy Carlson, have managed to create kingdoms for themselves. Keep up with us on Instagram @theconspiracypod! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is conspirituality in New Age culture?
What's your zodiac sign? Chances are, you know the answer. Even if you don't consider yourself spiritual in any way, you may check your horoscope from time to time. Had your palm read? Maybe you've even held onto a cool-looking crystal that a friend gave you. Put it somewhere as decoration. Not because you believe it has spiritual powers, but because it couldn't hurt, right? Of course not.
If it makes you feel better, that's great. Aside from the dust it collects, it's not causing any harm. But not all New Age ideas are considered the same. New Age belief systems and conspiracy theories are so often blended together that two academics coined the term conspirituality.
The distance between tarot cards and a new world order run by alien lizard people may be a lot shorter than you think. Take Amy Carlson, for example.
Chapter 2: Who was Amy Carlson and what role did she play?
It became really disturbing for me to understand that Amy created this belief system. She created this group. It was almost like a game of Dungeons and Dragons, right? Where she was like the dungeon master and she's coming up with all the rules and people are playing it her way. But when she said, time out, like I need to go to a hospital, the people in her game kept her in it.
They just provided her with more of the same thing that actually was killing her.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
To help us tell today's story, our team spoke with journalist Leah Satilli, author of the book Blazing Eye Sees All, an investigation of American New Age culture, particularly how self-proclaimed prophetesses like Love Has Ones Amy Carlson have managed to create kingdoms for themselves within our society. We're so grateful for her time and insights. Stay with us.
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Chapter 3: How did Love Has Won evolve over time?
Leah estimates that at its largest size, 24 people live in Crestone with Amy, including, at some points, young children and babies. The most trusted members stay in the main cabin, separated by sex. Lower tier members, and members being punished, are relegated to sleeping outside in tents, with or without heaters, depending on Amy's mood. They own a second house miles away for additional overflow.
One man arrives in Creststone after spending time in the military. He doesn't really give his family much notice that he's leaving. Leah says basically he lands in Denver, calls his family, and tells them he's in Colorado and joining a group. He spends less than 72 hours with Love Has Won.
There's video of him on the live stream saying like, I've arrived, I'm here. You know, he had already been so indoctrinated with their beliefs online that when he got there, he was like ready to talk about them. And you even hear a father God be like, well said, like you're talking about what we talk about almost better than we talk about it.
At some point, he says that he was handed a drink by someone. He drank that and he was told to go fight darkness in the wilderness. His family believes that he was drugged in some way. He went out into the woods. In this really remote area, he got lost. They didn't go looking for him and they lost track of him.
In a desperate attempt to find him, his family launches a rescue mission from hundreds of miles away.
No one lived anywhere near Colorado. So you had people driving there. You had people getting on flights. You had people online trying to say, hey, my brother is missing. We don't know where he is. We heard he's with this group. We don't think he's there anymore because I think people on the live stream were joking about him leaving. They launched this full assault to try and find him.
A man on Facebook said, I'll bring out my tracking dog to find him. And his sister was like, Okay, great. I don't know who you are, but I really hope you can help us. And they literally did find him walking on the side of the street. He had been in the hospital. He checked himself out of the hospital saying he didn't want to be there. He'd been found naked on someone's property.
It sounds to me like he was having like a serious psychedelic experience or a mental break. And he just had no support system at all from these people who said, come here. We love you more than anyone. Mother understands you. They just cast him to the wind.
It takes time for him to deprogram after he returns home. His family says he's unable to work for months. Meanwhile, Love Has Won continues to operate uninterrupted as both a spiritual group and a business, one with a few different income streams.
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Chapter 4: What are the beliefs of the Love Has Won community?
wrapped in a sleeping bag, covered in makeup, and essentially mummified.
By the time authorities find Amy Carlson's mummified body in April 2021, she'd been dead for weeks. According to Amy's teachings, she would finally ascend into 5D at a mountain in Northern California called Mount Shasta, popular in many New Age circles. Leah says when her followers realize that the end is near for Amy, that's where they take her. At some point, though, she has a revelation.
She was not to ascend from Mount Shasta. She was going to ascend from Ashland, Oregon, which is a couple hours north of Mount Shasta, also a very new agey town in the west. So they brought her to a hotel in Ashland and essentially just waited for her to die.
And she did, she died in a hotel room there surrounded by several of her followers who, you know, their deification of her is so evident from seeing the way that they treated her at the end of her life. Probably most chillingly, one of her closest followers said, God just died. Like, how are we supposed to respond to that? And so. Yeah, they were beside themselves grieving.
And I think that there was a lot of question around, what is this now? We don't worship Father God. Father God is just this guy that's supposed to be there as a support system for Mother God.
Amy weighed 75 pounds when she passed. There were moments before she died when she asked her followers for traditional medical care, but they continued giving her cannabis and what she taught them was real medicine, alcohol and colloidal silver. An autopsy will later reveal Amy died from health complications related to alcohol abuse, anorexia, and chronic colloidal silver ingestion.
But weeks pass before anyone outside of her followers knows she's dead.
They wrapped up her body and they took her out on a camping trip. Father God slept with her body in a tent. They had a campfire. They made pancakes. And then eventually some of her followers just said, you know what? She needs to go back to Colorado. They drove her across several state lines all the way back to southern Colorado, a very, very long drive, and set her up in that home.
I mean, I don't know what their plan was. It seemed like they were planning to live with her dead body for as long as they could to worship her.
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Chapter 5: How did Love Has Won gain followers during the pandemic?
In some cases, selling like t-shirts with Amy on it. Meanwhile, in Texas, her actual family is like, oh my God, what happened? And now we're dealing with the trauma of this loss of this person that we lost twice in our life. And now you're selling t-shirts of her? It was just really like so many layers of grief for them as well.
Her family has reflected on how Amy always admired fame and celebrity. And in the end... died a god when our team spoke with leah in march 2025 she said there were still people all across the globe with amy as their profile picture on facebook in australia in eastern europe in spanish-speaking countries for better or worse the legacy of mother god lives on.
But there's something Leah makes very clear in her book. American New Age ideas and leaders like Amy Carlson aren't new in any sense of the word.
As far as this book is concerned with Amy Carlson, she had no original ideas. They were all ideas that I don't even think she knew where they came from. This book tries to figure out where they did.
In her book, Leah traces the history of New Age beliefs and makes the case that they've traveled through time like a baton in a relay race, evolving with every handoff to best serve the holder. They began as part of a movement that resented science and expert knowledge and loved mystery.
In direct opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution, the earliest writings of American spiritualism spoke about a superior Aryan race and claimed humanity evolved from three-eyed beings known as... Lemurians. With each baton pass, leaders invented or incorporated countless more conspiracy theories. An evil lost society called Atlantis.
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Chapter 6: What are the living conditions like in the Love Has Won community?
The often anti-Semitic belief that a shadowy cabal is forming a new world order. Alien-human hybrids on Earth. Lizard people in the U.S. government, the list goes on and on. Not all of them are exclusive to New Age culture, but they've always been inextricably intertwined with its past and continue to inform its present.
Something else Leah notes, New Age ideas have always been especially attractive to women. Maybe because gender isn't attached to their concept of the divine. Maybe because unlike many religions, women often hold positions of power, whether it's as a leader, a mystic, seer, or healer.
Regardless, studies show that spiritualism surges in times of uncertainty and fear, when people are looking for hope and answers. times when it's normal to crave personal agency. Though her book touches on everything from seances to magic crystals, Leah hopes people don't see it as an attack on all New Age ideas.
This book began for me when I had 15 tarot decks and I wasn't sure why. I don't mean for this to be an attack, but for people to understand, look, this stuff is big. It's everywhere. You should know. Here's where it comes from. And here's where it starts to get grifty. Because I think that we are living in a time of grifters and that's not going to stop anytime soon.
So if anything, it's more of a cautionary tale of like, hey, you know, You go in a river, you might put on a life jacket. You go into the New Age, you might want to know that this does exist here. Have your eyes open for it.
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Chapter 7: How did members financially support Love Has Won?
Amy Carlson waded into the waters of the New Age and never came out. It's also a river that, by her own account, she knowingly created. See, among Amy's many past lives, she claims she once lived as a Russian woman named Helena Blavatsky. Helena arrived in New York City in the 1870s, a time when spiritualism was thriving.
Leah makes the case that American New Age culture really started with Helena Blavatsky's ideas and writings. In her lifetime, Helena developed a reputation for seemingly miraculous acts, summoning spirits at seances, making items appear from thin air. She claimed all of her ideas came from... ascended masters who divinely communicated their ancient wisdom to her.
On several occasions, she was accused of being a fraud, of using sleight-of-hand tricks to fool people. At least one time, she didn't deny it. She told the man who confronted her, quote, What is one to do when in order to rule men, it is necessary to deceive them? Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday.
Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. Thanks again to Leah Citilli for more information on American New Age culture. Check out her book, Blazing Eye Sees All. Among the many sources we used for this episode, we found it extremely helpful to our research.
Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, engineered by Sam Amezcua, and video edited and sound designed by Ryan Contra. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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