Amanda Quraishi reviewed Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile
disturbing in the best possible way
4 stars
I fucking love cults. Not joining them, of course. I was raised in one, so I expend an enormous amount of personal energy avoiding anything cult-like in my daily life and spiritual practice. However, it is undoubtedly due to my personal history that I have a morbid fascination with them. I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book.
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile is an interesting read. It features the well-publicized cult "Love Has Won" (the subject of an HBO documentary I've seen at least seven times, because it's that wild) as the central thread around which a disparate historical narrative about various American spiritual oddities is woven.
Sottile does a great job pulling common denominators from various influential cults and new age communities, highlighting the conspiratorial, antisemitic, and nationalistic themes that …
I fucking love cults. Not joining them, of course. I was raised in one, so I expend an enormous amount of personal energy avoiding anything cult-like in my daily life and spiritual practice. However, it is undoubtedly due to my personal history that I have a morbid fascination with them. I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book.
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile is an interesting read. It features the well-publicized cult "Love Has Won" (the subject of an HBO documentary I've seen at least seven times, because it's that wild) as the central thread around which a disparate historical narrative about various American spiritual oddities is woven.
Sottile does a great job pulling common denominators from various influential cults and new age communities, highlighting the conspiratorial, antisemitic, and nationalistic themes that these influential groups all seem to have as part of their ethos. It's particularly interesting in the context of the Q-anon (no fucking relation whatsoever - I was Q online long before those fuckers started up with their nonsense) phenomenon and its impact on the 2016 and 2024 elections, respectively.
Blazing Eye Sees All is a sobering read. If for no other reason than it forces us to accept how easy it is to mislead and manipulate people via constitutionally protected belief systems for nefarious, disturbing, and sometimes fatal-to-democracy ends. Go read it.