Sottile discusses New Age movements, women carving out influence, and the intersection in event promoting second novel

Leah Sottile is no stranger to conspiracy theories, extremist beliefs and fringe views.

It’s the arena where she’s made her bread and butter as a freelance journalist and the focus of her latest endeavor, “Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age.”

Inland Northwest residents packed the rooftop event center of the Steam Plant on Wednesday when Sottile discussed her second book delving into the world of New Age ideologies, folklore and personalities with reporter Emma Epperly as part of The Spokesman-Review’s Northwest Passages series.

“You hear that saying, ‘If you go far enough to the right or far enough to the left, the ideas start to meet each other,’ ” Sottile said. “So as I keep talking about this book, it’s like, this is the intersection point. This is where people who may present as really politically different find the shared ideas.”

The event was a reunion in more ways than one. For Sottile, it was a reunion with the Lilac City, where she began her journalism career at Gonzaga University and then the Inlander. For Epperly, it was a reunion with the newspaper where she covered public safety before joining Idaho Education News last fall.

It was also a reunion between the pair, who last spoke in a public forum shortly after the publication of Sottile’s first book, “When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times.” The thoroughly reported novel examines the extreme religious beliefs held by the couple and how they fit into the landscape of extremism in the West, and served as a jumping-off point for the topic of discussion Wednesday, Sottile said.

After writing her first book, Sottile said she decided she was ready for a break from reporting on extremism and wanted to write about trends that interested her. A Portland resident, Sottile said the markers of the New Age movement’s popularity were evidenced in her walks around her hometown, which seems to feature “a crystal shop on every corner.”

“You can kind of get this vibe that this New Age thing is a really big deal, and so I started looking into it,” Sottile said. “I’d heard a bit about this group called ‘Love has Won’ in Colorado, and before I knew it, I was writing another book about extremism.”

The new religious group Love Has Won, formerly called the Galactic Federation of Light, serves as a throughline for readers as Sottile explores the ideologies, people and trends that fall under the wide umbrella of the New Age movement.

Sottile said it was hard to approach such a “loosey-goosey thing,” with her usual approach rooted in concrete facts and figures, but she found herself gravitating toward exploring certain figures and questions, like the late Love Has Won leader Amy Carlson, and “how women find a place of standing for themselves in spirituality.”

Women tend to be more drawn to the movements than their counterparts, and Sottile said exploring female power tends to be a mainstay of her deep dives. She attributes it to her upbringing in the Catholic church where she admired the female saints, but at an older age realized women were not given much agency or power.

“That kind of gave me some characters to concentrate on, and so I started to try to find what their shared ideas were,” Sottile said. “You have people who believe in the lost civilization of Lemuria, you have people who use tarot cards and believe in aliens and that they’re ascended God-like beings.”

Carlson was one of the former. She claimed to be a 27,000-year-old refugee from a long-lost land called Lemuria who was later reincarnated as several prominent figures like Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe. She’s one of a number of New Age leaders Sottile explored dating back hundreds of years, claiming ties to mythological lost places like Atlantis or Lemuria.

Sottile does not approach Carlson’s story, or the many others contained in the book, as some may, with a chiding snicker or dismissive tone. Instead, she explores where New Age movements and leaders begin to cross the line into causing real harm, like any religious movement.

One of Sottile’s strengths is approaching topics with care and sincerity instead of the more dismissive reactions other reporters may have, she said. With coverage of the New Age movement, a lot has been surface level, or paints it more as “a joke, and less trying to understand why so many people are interested.”

“That’s what I was trying to do, is try to understand people really believe this, and people really have believed this for a long time,” Sottile said. “That’s interesting to me. I think that that says something about spirituality. I think it says something about power. It says something about what people are seeking.”