THIS WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN AFTER THE LEFT REJECTED MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: How New Age Women Turned Right. For some, the pursuit of inner truth is a dead end.
Amy Carlson wanted to be special. She tried astrology, and she tried men — angry, violent, useless men. One held a knife to her throat, which forced her to get a restraining order. One fathered her first child, but the relationship didn’t last. She married another man and gave birth to a daughter, and yet she was still restless. In 2005 she got divorced, and she delivered her last child, Aidan, the same year. That’s when she saw the archangel Michael. The great being was visible above Aidan’s crib, and he had a message for her alone. “It’s time,” he told her, and then he disappeared.
When Carlson told this story much later, she said she had no time to ask the angel any questions. Instead she looked to the internet, writes journalist Leah Sottile in her new book, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. Carlson began posting on a website called lightworkers.org, where she claimed that her spiritual “guides” had informed her of her true mission on earth. “They are insisting that I move out of 3d completely and begin living fully in 5th dimension … I have been balancing both,” she wrote, adding that she wanted to stop living in an “illusion.” Carlson’s posts “read like they were written by two different Amys,” Sottile observes: One had a purpose, and the other cried in the shower. Carlson also said online that a disembodied voice told her that she would become president of the United States. “I am choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and to step into my Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be,” she posted. Then, during a family dinner at a Mexican restaurant, she stood up and said she had to go. “I didn’t think she’d just leave and never come back,” her sister told Sottile, but that’s exactly what she did.
50 years ago in New York magazine, Tom Wolfe wrote about “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”
The encounter session—although it was not called that—was also a staple practice in psychedelic communes and, for that matter, in New Left communes. In fact, the analysis of the self, and of one another, was unceasing. But in these groups and at Esalen and in movements such as Arica there were two common assumptions that distinguished them from the aristocratic lemon sessions and personality finishings of yore. The first was: I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.
Wolfe connected the narcissism of the 1970s with the exploding popularity of the Born Again Christian movement, something that was entirely unexpected by establishment liberals in the late 1960s, especially after Time magazine asked in 1966, “Is God Dead?” (Note how they pulled their punch just slightly; even in 1966 America, America’s biggest weekly news magazine didn’t risk going the full Nietzsche.) However, the 2025 New York article above shows what happens when Me Decade-style narcissism and navel gazing meets the much darker religious trend that’s been undergoing newfound popularity as of late: The Return of Paganism:
To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.
If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.
To borrow from another prescient (albeit infinitely more turgidly written), but lesser-known title from the 1970s: Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.
Classical allusion in headline:
