New Age Conspirituality
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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 "conspiratuality."

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.

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 TheConspiracyPod, 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.

For those obsessed with conspiracies, cover-ups, and mysteries not meant for the light of day, this is your next addiction. Listen to the SCP Experience now wherever you get your podcasts. True Scary Story is a podcast about personal terrifying stories dealing with the paranormal. Out of nowhere, I see a dark figure.

True accounts from people who lived through strange and supernatural experiences. Come check it out. The podcast is called True Scary Story. We'll see you there.

Amy Carlson spends her teenage years growing up in the suburbs outside of Dallas, Texas. A very typical movie teenage suburban upbringing. Good family, two sisters.

really supported in anything she wanted to do. The type of kid who would get a car when she turned 16, that kind of family. Amy was really into singing and into, you know, looking her best, being very presentable. She competed in choir competitions, things of that nature. Yeah.

That's journalist and author Leah Satili, whose book Blazing Eye Sees All takes a magnifying glass to American New Age culture, its history, and the impact of modern leaders like Amy Carlson. As her story goes forward in time, she has her first child when she's pretty young, you know, 18 or 19 years old. And the relationship doesn't really work out.

She's not a very welcoming mother in that motherhood doesn't really fit her. Her son, Cole, who is her oldest child, just remembers her being very distant, crying a lot, not really wanting to have a lot to do with him. And even Amy's own mother, Linda, told me, you know, she didn't take to motherhood right away.

At a certain point, after Amy's had two more children with two other men, one of which she marries, they have a divorce, she starts drinking a lot, she gets a couple DUIs, she has some trouble, all the while managing several McDonald's stores throughout Texas. So she's got a fairly demanding job, but she's just...

There's something lacking in her life. And in her 30s, she encounters groups online that are talking about like the alien-human hybrid community, basically. Amy creates an account on the website Lightworkers.org. When she logs in, a moderator greets her with a message. It isn't by chance you are reading this page. You know why you have come. You are on a mission yourself.

in search of the elusive truth, the meaning of life. The concept of lightworkers, sometimes called starseeds, can be found across many New Age ideologies. Leah says the term generally refers to a person who considers themself supernaturally gifted from another dimension or, in some cases, inhabited by an alien being. They usually consider themselves beacons for good.

Many lightworkers, Leah says, claim to have a moment of great awakening when they suddenly become conscious of their so-called true identity and abilities like a veil is lifted. In Amy's case, she says she hears a voice whisper in her ear one day.

I can't remember what the specifics of it are, but it's essentially like you're a god. You are fated to be something big and bigger than this mother who manages McDonald's stores, never got famous as a singer. Like at one point she hears a voice that says, you'll be the president of the United States. And she's like, oh my God, I believe that's actually true.

Amy begins writing about these experiences in online forums. Her thoughts and feelings are validated by community members. Before long, her family notices her spending more and more time online, spiraling down new age rabbit holes. Amy later refers to these sessions as information downloads. Online, she forges a special connection with a man who calls himself Amaranth White Eagle.

They eventually come to believe that they are each other's twin flames and decide to, quote, be together in the physical.

In one fell swoop, Amy decides to abandon her life in Texas, including her three young children, to pursue a new chapter of existence. She literally backs away from a table at a restaurant with her family and says, I'm leaving. And they think, oh, you're just going home, something like that. But what she does is she actually literally just leaves her life and they don't see her again. Amy leaves around Thanksgiving 2007.

She and Amareth travel the country a while before landing in southern Colorado in a town called Crestone. It's around this time that Amy takes on a new identity. She begins calling herself Amareth.

And what she means by that is that she is the physical embodiment of the planet. That's the best that she explains it. She is Earth itself. So any damage to her, whether that's emotional, physical, is actually damaging to the Earth itself. Amy weaves a very elaborate story about how she came to Earth.

came to be in her current form. And the big part of that is that she is a reincarnated being. She says she's been reincarnated something like 574 times and that in her past lives, she was Cleopatra. She was Joan of Arc. She was the Queen of Lemuria.

Lemuria comes up in a lot of New Age belief systems. It's often presented as a former utopia that disappeared off the face of the earth long ago. It'll come up again later when we dive deeper into the history of New Age conspiracy theories. Amy's other past lives supposedly include Pocahontas, Marilyn Monroe, and Jesus, who, according to Amy, was actually a woman and not a man.

Amareth and Amy suggest they've known each other in many past lives, but claim their souls have been separated for 26,000 years.

Amarath, she announces, is father god. She developed an idea that she is mother god. Whoever the man that she is personally with at that point is father god. There ended up being many father gods over time. In Crestone, Amy and Amarath launch a new group founded on their shared beliefs. Some come in person, but Leah says they primarily function online as a website similar to the ones where Amarath and Amy first connected.

They leverage social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to spread their message.

As the spiritual leader, Amy creates a lot of video content. She starts to kind of like distribute new age ideas and a lot of astrological predictions. She would do like almost like a newscast where she would wear this little headset and she would speak to the camera and she would give this really kind of like weather forecast of the stars in a way. It was really funny and it was really kind of like sweet.

If you're living in that reality, I could almost see how it would be attractive. Over time, Amy cycles through different father gods. More followers move to Crestone. Some leave and others stay as the group evolves and changes. The Galactic Free Press becomes First Contact Ground Crew, which becomes 5D News until they eventually land on the name Love Has Won.

They rebrand with a new website that puts Amy's image front and center. Over time, Amy becomes less accessible to the general public. She stops interacting with members online and hands over her spiritual duties to members she trusts who have supposedly gone through training. The stated mission of Love Has Won becomes to heal the world with love.

Leah says there are no charitable components to the group. That mission mostly manifested in members sharing their ideas online.

in hours-long telethon-style live streams, usually twice a day. They're almost impossible to watch because even if you understand the code that they're talking in, it's very confusing and it's just rambling. And so they would be running these live streams with two people talking about all of their concepts, but...

also about lots of conspiracy theories. So that to them was healing the world with love, was engaging with people who had questions about their spiritual ideas. Okay, I can understand a church saying, we heal the world with love because look how we're giving all this money to this children's program or we're helping refugees get housing or things like that. When you're just like chatting with people in a live stream, it

It is just more supremely online than perhaps I'm willing to be and to understand as love. But I guess, you know, there's a lot of lonely people in the world and that is love to them is to make friends with other people online. So it's complex. Especially from the outside looking in, love is one's ideas can feel convoluted. Leah calls it a buffet of new age beliefs. First, there's Amy, who is the foundation of the group.

The physical manifestation of both the Earth itself and God on Earth. Then there's their goal of raising the consciousness of humanity to a higher plane of existence. Most people, they claim, live in 3D. An imperfect world filled with darkness. Love as One wants to ascend into 5D, a sort of utopia.

Then there's the Ascended Masters, saint-like figures who divinely communicate messages to Amy from another realm.

Ascended Masters are found in many New Age groups, but Love Has Won puts a unique twist on the concept. The Ascended Masters, or the Galactics as she calls them in Love Has Won, are people that you and I and many people who listen to your show would be familiar with. They are Chris Farley, they are Whitney Houston, Tupac Shakur, and most notably, the actor Robin Williams. Robin Williams holds a

larger place than anyone in the love has one belief system. It sounds objectively ridiculous to say here's a group of people who worships Robin Williams, right? But what I came to understand in my reporting is that Robin Williams was really kind of like

an entry point for Amy to get people into the group. They heard about Robin Williams and they were like, "Oh my God, I loved Robin Williams and I feel so sad about his sudden death." We can all talk about Robin Williams in "Mrs. Doubtfire" or "What Dreams May Come" or his standup performances or "Mork & Mindy."

Robin Williams might serve as a gateway, a means of getting people's foot in the door, but many find the message of Love Has Won appealing. Some travel to Creststone, Colorado from across the country to be with Amy. Leah says a few tell their partners they're leaving for a much-needed spiritual break, that they're essentially going on a retreat and won't be gone for very long.

not fully realizing what they're signing up for. Essentially, if you were living in the Love Has One house, you were a servant of Amy and her father, God, at that time. That's what it became.

Love Has Won becomes especially popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the vast majority of followers interact with the group in virtual settings, some travel to Colorado to live with Amy and her closest disciples. Leah says the area is beautiful and incredibly isolated, hours away from the nearest major airport.

Moving in with the Love Has Won community comes with hard and fast rules, like relinquishing financial freedom. Members are made to pool their resources and for the most part, Leah says they have very little control over how that money gets spent. Nearly all personal purchases need to be approved.

In her book, Leah tells the story of a man who liquidates his 401k and hands over $400,000 of his life savings in the two months he spends with Love Has Won. He apparently never sees the money again.

One gal I spoke to, like she got there and thought, oh, I'll just get a piece of pizza when I land. And like the people who picked her up were like, no, no, no, you're not getting that. Like you don't get to, you don't get to do that. So what I think is so fascinating about these groups is that even the people who aren't

from the power enforce the rules. You know, I like to call them Amy's deputies because they really were kind of like spreading her message and appointed by her to do so. They were the most hard liners about

doing things the way that Amy wanted. So you had that financial control, you had the inability to leave. You also had people who had kids, who had spouses, and they were really not allowed to call them. Maybe they could get permission to make a call, but it was rare. And in one instance, there was a woman who was starting to have real doubts about being there.

According to some former members of the group, if they wanted to leave to go anywhere, they had to do so in assigned pairs.

At home, they spend all day working, cooking food according to Amy's preferences, and generally catering to her ever-changing whims, serving her a steady stream of alcohol and weed, which she said were medicinal. Their sleep is restricted, their eating is monitored, naps are banned, even sitting is policed.

Those same members say they spend every day almost entirely on their feet. Resting in any way was taking energy from Mother God, which is an affront to the earth itself.

You know, a typical day at the Love Has One house was essentially you were going to get maybe four hours sleep if you were lucky. And that was because if Amy was awake and drinking, then you two were awake with her. If she was asleep, you may be allowed to go to bed. Father God was kind of seen as sort of the enforcer of.

And so, and at one point, Father God and arguably Amy too decided, we just want you to cut down all these trees around the house. But we're not going to allow you to do that with a chainsaw. You're going to do that with hand tools. And we're going to watch you from the patio of the house do hard, hard labor to just clear this area because Amy wants a garden. Right.

You know, so it was back-breaking work. 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 Crestone 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'll find him.

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. One was selling...

kind of spiritual consultations over the phone. What has long been called in new age circles, like a psychic surgery. They also sold a lot of products. They sold candles, they sold crystals, they sold artwork painted by Amy and Father God. I would say the most lucrative product for them, the most expensive one was colloidal silver.

this is something that transcends politics. It transcends really cultural beliefs. You've got the most conservative militia guys agreeing with the most hippie moms about that colloidal silver is a substance that you should ingest. And really the way that it's made is like putting a

battery hooked up to wires and water. And they sold that as this sort of divine substance. And it was expensive, you know, several hundred dollars. So people would buy colloidal silver. They needed to be taking it every day. Obviously, you get people taking a substance that's expensive every day. They're going to need to keep buying it from you. In the past, Alex Jones sold colloidal silver as a dietary supplement.

And Gwyneth Paltrow once said she uses it as an antibacterial treatment and sprays it on her seat when traveling on planes. The actual substance is nothing special. It's basically tiny globs of silver floating in some kind of base liquid.

Some have claimed it treats COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, herpes, shingles, and even acne. Before the discovery of antibiotics, silver was used in their place to treat infections or wounds, but the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration both have found no benefits to ingesting silver.

In fact, they found it can cause serious side effects. Back in the 1800s,

There were people who worked in silver mines that would die of silver poisoning and they would have ingested so much silver into their bodies that their skin would turn blue. Most notably, there was a man who died and when they did an autopsy of his body, all of his organs were blue, his liver, his heart, like it had changed his physical body so severely that it killed him.

And with Amy Carlson, you see that as she goes forward in her life, she starts to kind of turn gray at a certain point. And that gray becomes a kind of purple, becomes a kind of blue. Amy Carlson's behavior spirals out of control. She begins berating her followers for minor perceived errors, like serving her meatballs when her so-called vision specifically called for chicken parmesan.

She has a toddler shut away in a dark closet for crying too loudly. She even goes so far as to invite her followers, some of whom she views as traitors, to battle her. Amy Carlson's life, you know, she starts to become extremely anti-Semitic. She starts to say super racist stuff.

She's got conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and lizard people. America is a divine land kind of thing. Her health spirals too. She stops eating and her binge drinking and colloidal silver use take their toll. Flash forward to April 28th, 2021. Father God is now a man named Jason Castillo. Authorities are called to the Love Has Won Home to perform a welfare check.

It's not their first visit. They said, look, we're here to check on the kids that are living here and we're here to talk to mother. They were very familiar with who Amy was at that point. And Jason Castillo really chillingly says, OK, well, the children are sleeping and mother is in rest. She has rested.

They didn't know what that meant, but they went in the house. This is like after midnight. There were several people in the house. They're all awake, like working on their projects that they've been given. They're not sleeping yet. The police go into the back bedroom of the home and it's essentially a shrine. There are Christmas lights everywhere, twinkling, covering every surface, the bed, the furniture, the ceiling. And in the bed is Amy Carlson's dead body.

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...

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. So 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. After authorities discover Amy's body in April 2021, several of her followers are arrested on charges of abusing a corpse. A DA later adds, tampering with the deceased human body. But all charges are eventually dropped. The other members of Love Has Won face no legal consequences related to Amy's death,

In fact, before Amy's body was discovered by police, one of her followers had already filed the paperwork with the IRS to start another nonprofit group. There's probably three or four groups that break away and start their own thing. They start writing books about her. They put out books.

educational curriculum that they believe that was like one of Mother God's goals was to have schools that were set up in her image and her ideology. And of course, everybody starts selling colloidal silver and live streaming, in some cases selling like t-shirts with Amy on it. Meanwhile, in Texas, her actual family is like, oh my God, what?

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. 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. And 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 and have your eyes open for it. 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 Satili. 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 Laurie Siegel, engineered by Sam Amezcua, and video edited and sound designed by Ryan Contra. I'm your host, Carter Roy.