I enjoy holding a book. Adult life has made reading books “the old fashioned way” increasingly difficult. I still do it from time to time, but in order to read the number of books I want to read I need something that will keep going even when my brain is incessantly screaming at me that I’m underemployed or not actively being in the vanguard of the better world I dream of. Which is to say, I listen to audio books now sometimes? Basically, I’d like to do a cute artistic photo-shoot of the book cover to throw up here, but I don’t understand what I am and am not allowed to use that I didn’t create myself so I tried reproducing the book cover with the drawing tablet I use for math stuff. Someone tell me if this is an appropriate whimsy or if I’m just being an asshole?

Anyway, I guess this is the second Lea Sottile book I’ve read as she also wrote When the Moon Turns to Blood, but this week I experienced Blazing Eye Sees All as read by the author herself (honestly, she’s a very good narrator to the point I had assumed it was read by a professional VA or something). If you’re looking for something to put on during a road trip or something, see if you can’t borrow it from your local library or something via Libby or whatnot. Content of the book itself aside, it’s genuinely enjoyable to listen to.

I read a lot of cult analysis and deconstruction books as well as cult memoirs. As a cult survivor myself it helps me feel less alone. But I’m also at a point in my life where the wall I built to “protect” myself from the influences of “evil spirits” that I was taught infest all manner of non-Christian spiritual practices has broken through enough that I’m on a personal spiritual journey of my own. I really appreciated this book’s approach which takes multiple stories of spiritual leaders and really helps give them context and shows how they came to be and why people chose to follow them. It presents all this without judgement or malice, telling a story that acknowledges the spiritual needs of the individual while also offering a caution for potential dangers.

Blazing Eye Sees All covers the story of Amy Carlson and the identity she adopted as Mother God in the group Love Has Won. This is a story that got a lot of public attention around when Carlson passed away in 2021. A lot of that attention was focused on how absurd the story was and is and was told in a way that takes away from the human experience of the people involved. Sottile does an amazing job of not letting the reader forget that all of the characters involved are real people with real lives and real families that care, love, and miss them.

Another story that gets woven in between the tale of Love Has Won is that of Ramtha and his “channeler” J.Z. Knight. She’s still active to this day as far as I know as I have heard about her and the being Ramtha she plays host to from various podcasts and other books on spiritualism and cults, but was more active in the public eye some 40 years before Love Has Won did the same. This really helps demonstrate that cults like this built around a charismatic leader with an interesting story to tell and an ancient spiritual being as an advisor isn’t a new thing unique to our time.

I wont retell either of these stories in detail, as Sottile does that in the book better than I ever could here, so if this interests you I’ll once again remind you to visit and use your local library. What I will do, though, is describe two situations described in the book that really touched me personally and why.

First, she mentions that in the aftermath of the HBO documentary on Love Has Won that people leveled criticism of Amy Carlson’s mother and family for not doing enough to prevent her from creating the group that she effectively eventually fell victim to herself. This is a thing I see a lot in spaces that discuss cults online, people treat documentaries like the one in question as reality TV shows and people develop these ideas of everyone’s flaws and failures that they seem to think is a complete story and often times inflict those ideas on the real people they’ve never met. Blazing Eye Sees All is another documentary, granted, just in a different format than the one aired on HBO, but it does help make clear that the families of people involved in dangerous cults do have the love that many “fans” deny they possess and are putting in untold amounts of unseen work to help their loved ones–a reminder that what we see on our TV screens isn’t complete and sometimes building a fuller picture just doesn’t make “good television”.

Another story Sottile tells is about Mark Vicente on the stand during the trial of another cult leader Kieth Raniere of NXIVM where his character is drug by the defense for involvement in cults prior to the one in question where he was a key whistleblower. Very much on the same page as the previous anecdote, I really appreciated the humanizing effect this has for cult survivors. “Cult hopping” isn’t an uncommon thing for cult survivors to do and it isn’t because they’re unintelligent or foolish. I never went down this road myself, but when you lose something that gave you answers that nothing else can or will there is a void inside that desperately wants to be filled.

So to conclude, if you’re a cult survivor yourself I recommend this book as it may help you feel less alone and seen by someone who, to the best of my knowledge, is not herself a cult survivor. If you aren’t a cult survivor I recommend this book as a humanizing lens that may give you a little bit of understanding that might possibly give you access to the right kind of empathy and understanding to give space to someone you may know who is falling victim to a potentially dangerous cult.