A blue corpse, a McDonald’s manager, Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon: The latest cult that viewers are obsessed with

On April 29, 2021, a police patrol entered a house in Crestone, a town in Saguache County, Colorado. During the search, they found a mummified body in a room. Under several brightly-colored blankets, covered with stuffed bunnies, you could make out a bluish face that didn’t look human. The room was decorated like a child’s bedroom: there were drawings of rainbows and hearts on the walls.

The police thought that the eyes were missing from the body… but the truth was that they were so sunken that they could barely be seen. The coroner certified that the female had been dead for several weeks. She was identified as 45-year-old Amy Carlson. Although, for her followers, she was Mother God, the 534th reincarnation of a deity that was more than 19 billion years old, who had given birth to all creations and had previously been reincarnated in figures such as Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc… and Marilyn Monroe.

Mother God’s mission in the 21st century was to take 144,000 believers out of the surface reality of our so-called “3D World” and into the fifth dimension. To achieve this purpose, Mother God had the help of a group of figures called the Galacticos, with whom she communicated on a regular basis. Among the Galacticos were (supposedly) John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Robin Williams.

With her plan complete, Mother God had ascended. However, the coroner’s report was less poetic: it attributed her death to a mixture of “alcohol abuse, anorexia and chronic ingestion of colloidal silver,” a supposedly natural antibiotic that proved to be highly toxic and was responsible for the blue coloration of her body.

The wild story of Carlson and her acolytes is the focus of the HBO documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. The film is produced by the Safide brothers, who are best known for Uncut Gems. Directed by Hannah Olson, Love Has Won narrates — in three chapters — the story of Carlosn’s relatives and followers, placing many of them in front of the camera. Several members of the cult are still active and spreading the divinity of their deceased leader, whose theories are available thanks to thousands of videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.

“I became really interested in the rise in conspiratorial thinking embodied by Donald Trump, people who follow him,” Olson told Vulture, in an interview following the documentary’s premiere. “The subjects fell through the cracks of our social system in a way that’s really familiar to me, growing up in the Midwest: no access to health care, no access to mental-health care.”

That was the main characteristic of Carlson’s followers: they had all sought answers to questions that don’t always have them. Frustration led them to conspiracy theories… and Carlson’s website. The cult of Mother God had just over a dozen permanent faithful who lived to satisfy the needs of their leader, although the group reached about two hundred people and branched across three continents. The main question the documentary tries to answer is: how did a cheerful manager of a Texas McDonald’s become a mummified body veiled as a deity?

A higher vibrational consciousness

Carlson had an ordinary childhood. She was the eldest of three sisters and her parents were divorced. Her time in school was calm and discreet. She was a good student with an interest in design. After getting a job at a local McDonald’s, within a year, she was the manager. She had a difficult time in relationships: by the age of 20, she was a single mother with three children from three different fathers.

Carlson began to develop a love for drinking and the esoteric — a world she discovered thanks to the online spiritual forums of a still-primitive internet. In one chat room, she met a man who called himself Amerith WhiteEagle, an old hippie who told her what she wanted to hear: that she was on Earth for a purpose. She left McDonald’s and her three children without telling anyone, moving in with Amerith. They sat at the door of a dilapidated cabin among garbage bags and empty bottles, talking about UFOs and leaving this world to reach “the higher vibratory consciousness.” Carlson became aware that the only way to spread her message of love and spirituality was on social media. She and Amerith founded the free Galactic Diary, where they recorded videos using music from The Alan Parsons Project.

But she aspired to more. It didn’t take long for her to realize that, while she was the only Mother God, there were many Father Gods, so she abandoned Amerith and began to forge her own network of followers. The first to arrive was Miguel Lambboy, known as “the archangel Lambay” — a New Yorker with formal manners, who began to shape the foundations of a movement that would become known as Love Has Won. He was the second Father of God.

“There was always a Father of God… not even two minutes went by without one,” says one of the former followers in the documentary. The third was Andrew, a handsome fellow in his 20s, who found Carlson’s website while struggling with addiction to painkillers. He was looking for information about 9/11 conspiracy theories, aliens and the Illuminati… common subject matter among new sects and movements such as QAnon.

The devotees shared their disillusionment with a system that didn’t meet their expectations. They sought refuge after dealing with serious health problems, addictions, or breakups.

“They were looking for a reason for why their lives didn’t end up the way they thought they would,” Olson noted. And there’s nothing more unifying than common fears and the certainty that one is aware of things that the rest of people don’t know about.

Like the Manson family at home

A fairly homogeneous group gathered around Carlson. Almost all of them were young, enthusiastic and with a certain attractiveness, creating a less dramatic version of the Manson family. As is typical in cults, nothing was aggressive at first. There was love and spirituality in the air. When Andrew — another protagonist of the documentary — became the new Father of God, he began to contribute his $700 monthly subsidy from the movement to buy food and marijuana for everyone “We were high from the moment we got up until the moment we went to bed,” he declares on camera. Another follower took all of his retirement money out of the bank and gave it to Carlson.

The restrictions didn’t take long to arrive. Shortly after joining the group, members were encouraged to cut ties with unsupportive family members. Their food intake and sleep schedules were also monitored: for weeks, they ate only oatmeal and slept four hours a night. Sexual relations were forbidden — they were expected to lead a celibate life. Their mission was to always be alert to Carlson’s needs and boost the Love Has Won website with social media posts, videos, articles and — the main source of financing — the sale of items.

On their website, you could purchase everything from soaps to sweatshirts, as well as colloidal silver (which the members made themselves) for healing. They claimed that Carlson could cure everything, from depression to cancer, while performing spiritual “surgeries.” Mother God, meanwhile, bought clothes and jewelry, got drunk and began to manifest aggressive behaviors that increased with the arrival of a new Father of God. This time, though, it wasn’t an old hippy or a confused young man, but a handsome ex-convict who arrived at the house with an electronic locator on his ankle. Carlson dispatched the former Father of God by naming him Father of the Multiverse.

The new Father

Jason Castillo — a maintenance technician who, like Carlson, had abandoned his job and his four children — began to take control of the house and intimidate the rest of the cult members. They tried to avoid him by fleeing to Oregon, but he followed them and returned to lead the house alongside an increasingly exhausted Mother God. Living on alcohol and colloidal silver, she could hardly move anymore. Jason had to carry her in his arms. She spent hours sitting in the shower.

The task of answering messages on Love Has Won’s social media fell to the “archangels” — two beautiful university girls, whose talks in front of the camera could pass for those given by any influencer… except that their message was racist, homophobic and antisemitic. The cries of “love can do everything” were usually mixed with praise for Hitler. Sometimes, up to ten members gathered in front of the camera, clapping and singing, smoking marijuana and joking while sitting on rugs and cushions.

When Carlson stopped appearing, they justified her absence by claiming that her “vibration was starting to get so high that it could cause viewers to explode.” Amy’s absence in the videos alarmed her family, who contacted the Dr. Phil show. This connection didn’t build any bridges. Then, worried about her health, they contacted the police, but were told that there was nothing they could do. As was discovered later on, Carlson had actually tried to ask for help from traditional medicine, but her followers dissuaded her, saying that, in a hospital, she would be exposed to the evil forces that had been trying to kill her for thousands of years.

The police did respond to a call in April 2021, which alerted them to the presence of a body in a house. The caller was Miguel Lamboy, the former Father of God, who was responsible for the first steps of the sect and — as the rest of the members allege today — of the disappearance of thousands of dollars that were in the Love Has Won accounts. Lamboy revealed to the police that when Carlson had begun “her ascension,” her followers had put a hat and sunglasses on her and had traveled 1,200 miles with her corpse in the front seat of a van. They were transporting it from Oregon to Colorado… the place where an alien spaceship would supposedly pick her up.

The aliens never showed up, but the police did. While all the inhabitants of the house were arrested that night, the charges were dismissed and they were set free. For a time, they were watched, for fear that Carlson’s acolytes would attempt to accompany their leader via collective suicide. But instead, they simply dedicated themselves to continuing with the cult’s prolific video production, already under other names. For the sects of the 21st century, it seems, there’s no worse death than disappearing from social media.

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