Moldavite Wants to Be Free

On crystals, cults, and the high of almost believing

There is a yoga studio I go to in Chicago, on the third floor of an office building between a tax preparer and a wholesale jewelry importer. The elevator trembles when it moves and works only half the time. The glass doors are scratched and clouded, and when you push them open, the smell of fish and urine greets you. Inside, it’s too crowded; mats overlap, everyone’s belongings pile in corners, the air hangs heavy wi th palo santo, Nag Champa and sage. The teacher always speaks in a hush, as if the fluorescent light itself were sacred.

She plays ambient music and tells us things like “you are light-beings having a human experience.”

The building itself is unremarkable from the street: red brick, narrow windows suggesting decades of filing cabinets, and fluorescent overhead lights. It goes unnoticed in a city full of architecture demanding attention. But inside, on that third floor, there exists this pocket of intentional tranquility, this space carved from commercial banality.

The studio is small.

Even 15 people make it crowded. The carpet, the same carpet it must have had when it was what I always imagine as an actuary’s office, is worn from years of bare feet, and water stains mark the ceiling tiles. During Savasana, lying flat on our backs in corpse pose, I stare at those stains and think about the plumbing in the floors above us. The radiators clank and hiss. I can hear a toilet flushing. Outside, the Brown line passes, and the whole room trembles slightly, a reminder that we are not floating in some ethereal realm, but lying in an office building in Chicago. I take a deep breath and take in the smell – the urine, the fish, the faint odor of mold.

Sometimes I look at her and wish I could believe her without irony. I envy people who can find transcendence in recycled air. I know she’s wrong, and still, I want her to be right. There’s a kind of warmth in believing the impossible that I can almost feel before my knees jerk and dismantle it. What I mean is: I can see the appeal. I can feel it tugging at something in me, that desire to believe we are more than bodies. The teacher speaks with such conviction, such gentle certainty, that for moments at a time I can almost let myself slip into that worldview. Almost.

But then my mind catches itself, pulls back, insists on its skepticism.

There are highs people chase their whole lives, and mine is believing in bullshit with my whole heart. I crave a specific strain of bullshit, though: the kind that smells faintly of incense, that hides in strip malls between Massage Envys and vape shops. The kind sold by psychics who also sell leggings on Facebook Live and tell you the fabric contains sacred geometry. I’m drawn to the aesthetics of belief, to the visual and sensory language of the implausible. I collect it the way some people collect casual sex. I save screenshots of websites promising to realign your chakras for $19.99. I watch YouTube videos of energy healers who wave their hands over prone bodies and claim to be curing 3D tumors. I read testimonials about supplement websites where people swear that drinking structured water or taking iodine drops or eating beef liver has cured their anxiety, their insomnia and their existential dread.

I’m not immune to the appeal – I’m not just a tourist. I’m not on safari.

I’ve bought the crystals. They’ve spoken to me. I’ve burned sage in my home until the smoke detector went off. I’ve listened to binaural beats on my headphones, hoping for the promised altered states of consciousness. I have seen Reiki practitioners and done guided meditations.

But I have such doubts. Such unshakeable doubts.

I want more than anything to touch the place where belief lives. They are plate spinners, that circus act where someone keeps multiple plates rotating on top of long poles, running from pole to pole to give each plate another twist before it wobbles and falls. That’s what these belief systems feel like to me: precarious constructions kept aloft through constant effort and attention. I want to watch them in motion, to see how long they can stay up, to witness the exact moment when they begin to falter. Because they do falter. They always do. The law of gravity applies even to metaphysics.

Amy Carlson’s face was blue when she died. The colloidal silver did that, turned her skin that color. I’ve watched the HBO documentary twice, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. The footage shows her bloated, confused, livestreaming to followers she exhorted to call her “Mother God,” to call her Mom, to see her as God. She claimed to be a 19-billion-year-old deity who had been Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Robin Williams, Saint Germain and Jesus Christ. They sold crystals and colloidal silver in streams that felt like a weedsoaked QVC. When she died, they wrapped her corpse in a sleeping bag and Christmas lights and waited for resurrection.

“The body was warm,” her followers insist. And you can tell, they still believe.

I love the way her followers spoke about her with such love and certainty.

They’re not monsters or even stupid – they’re not stupid at all. They’re people who wanted something to believe in, who wanted to be part of something more transcendent than themselves, who wanted a Mom who would never leave them.

Amy Carlson was not Mother God, though. She was a woman from Kansas who struggled with alcoholism, who gathered around her other struggling people and built a shared reality that eventually killed her. The colloidal silver turned her skin blue. The alcohol destroyed her liver. And when she died, her followers wrapped her body in a sleeping bag, put it in a back room, and kept livestreaming, kept selling crystals, kept insisting that she would return.

They kept her corpse for weeks.

Amy Carlson never did anything miraculous. She said she was God – and yet she did nothing, only streaming, only YouTube videos filmed at the foot of Mount Shasta or in Colorado or on the road, on the way to Hawaii, insisting that she was Pele, to mobs of angry Hawaiians.

She died as a person does, a 3D person. She slurred her words in the videos, her eyes unfocused, her movements uncoordinated. She raged at her followers, at the camera, at the world that wouldn’t believe in her, that wouldn’t raise its vibration. Near the end, she could barely move.

Her followers had to carry her to the bathroom, feed her, dress her. And still they called her God! Still they livestreamed her decline, framing it as “ascension,” as Mother God taking on the pain of humanity, as a sacrifice being made for us. The cognitive dissonance required to maintain this belief in the face of such obvious evidence is staggering. Belief doesn’t require evidence. It requires only the willingness to ignore evidence, to reframe it, to fit it into a narrative that preserves the core conviction.

Amy Carlson is dead, and she did not resurrect.

Her followers eventually had to contend with that fact, though some of them still haven’t. Some of them still maintain that her death was part of the plan, that she’s working on another dimensional plane to prepare for the next phase of ascension.

What a high – a life unhindered by doubt, when anything could be true. It’s the moment in yoga class when the teacher says we are beings of light and for a split second, I don’t automatically dismiss it. It’s the moment when I’m holding a crystal and think there’s something to this. It’s the moment when I read about quantum mysticism or sacred geometry and think that perhaps the universe is stranger than our rational minds can comprehend, that perhaps there are truths that science hasn’t yet discovered, that perhaps everything we think we know is just a thin layer of understanding over an infinite complexity. That moment, that suspension between skepticism and belief, is the high.

Echo Mehta was everywhere when I was at NYU. She was beautiful in a way that interrupted lectures, hovering at the edge of consciousness like someone you once loved and now can’t quite place. Her hair was dark and thick, always falling in front of her eyes, and she had a way of pushing it back that felt like a gesture from another era, something practiced in front of mirrors until it looked entirely natural. She wore vintage dresses, the kind you find in expensive Brooklyn thrift stores, and silver rings on most of her fingers. She smelled like cigarettes.

Everyone knew her or knew of her. She seemed to exist on a different plane than everyone else. She was someone who moves through the world with a kind of certainty and strangeness that makes them magnetic. She was always surrounded by people, and yet she never seemed entirely present with any of them. She gave you her attention like a gift, intense and focused, and then withdrew it just as suddenly, leaving you feeling like you’d lost something you never quite had. I was in love with her, the way everyone was in love with her, which is to say I was her captive audience.

She would talk about auras and past lives, about the Akashic records and the collective unconscious, about how our souls choose our traumas before we’re born so we can learn the lessons we need to learn. She said these things with absolute conviction, and people believed her, or wanted to believe her, or at least wanted to be the kind of people who could believe her. She made the most ridiculous claims feel so indelibly true.

She told me she could see spirits. She said she had memories of past lives: as a priestess in Atlantis, as a healer in ancient Egypt, as a young woman who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

She talked about moldavite, the green, glassy stone formed by meteorites. She said it could accelerate your spiritual evolution so fast it might ruin your life. She wore a piece around her neck that she’d shoplifted from a store in the East Village.

“They’re overcharging,” she said. “Moldavite wants to be free.”

Echo was a favorite of Saint Germain, the Ascended Master. She said he’d appeared to her since she was fourteen.

“They’re preparing specific people,” she told me. “Not everyone can handle the downloads.”

Echo had a secret Facebook group where she shared Pleiadian downloads. About 30 of us, mostly NYU grads working jobs we were overqualified for. I was an archival producer for American Experience, the PBS show, which sounds more impressive than it was. Mostly I watched old footage and wrote timestamps.

The parts of my life I remember with the most tenderness always involve unconditional acceptance of people like Echo. That yes, Echo was a starseed. That yes, these crystals contained ancient wisdom. That yes, the universe was desperately trying to communicate with me through angel numbers and parking spots.

Echo’s posts started gentle.

“The Pleiadians want you to know you’re loved.” “Your struggles are preparing you for your mission.” Then came the warnings. The dimensional shift. The purge.

“Not everyone will make it to New Earth,” she wrote one night at 3 a.m. “Millions will choose to exit rather than ascend. This is their soul contract. Do not mourn them.”

Once, Echo invited me to her apartment and served me golden milk. This was before you could buy golden milk at a coffee shop. Back when it was a special drink only Echo knew how to make, with dried roses floating to the top, and too much turmeric burning my mouth. She touched my forehead with her sticky hands, her face close to mine. Her breath smelled like cigarettes and rot.

“You’re opening your third eye too fast,” she told me. She said that my soul was from earth, not the stars. She held my hand. She burned sage and Nag Champa.

“When I met you, I didn’t think you were that energetically connected. You seemed dead inside. Like there was nothing there. But you’re not. You have it. You’re special.”

There was a woman in our group, Lauren, who had bipolar disorder. She stopped taking her medication because Echo said pharmaceuticals lowered your vibration. She gave away her furniture. She started calling estranged family members to tell them she’d see them in the next density if they made the cut.

Echo never broke character. I’d heard her on the phone with her mom, sounding completely normal, complaining about student loans. But when Lauren posted increasingly unhinged messages, Echo just responded with more Pleiadian wisdom.

The intervention came from David, this pudgy Marxist kid who’d joined partly as a joke and partly because he had a crush on Echo.

“This is fucked,” he told me over terrible coffee at Veselka. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

I defended Echo. I said Lauren had her own issues. I said we all knew it was metaphorical.

What follows is blurry, maybe from shame. David screenshotted our conversations where I’d admitted to doubts, where I’d joked about Echo’s downloads. He shared them with the group. I was expelled first, my vibration too low for the coming shift. The betrayal felt physical, like something had been ripped out of my chest. The whole community collapsed within a week.

Lauren ended up hospitalized. David went back on everything he said, started posting about mercury retrograde. Echo mourned the loss, cryptic Facebook statuses about how she couldn’t trust people anymore. Sympathy pouring in from everywhere. From writers and models and Chloë Sevigny.

I missed the group immediately. Not the drama, but the feeling of being connected to something vast and mysterious. My ex-husband and I were living in Middle Village, Queens, in an apartment crawling with roaches, an hour from anything that mattered. Every day I’d watch WWI footage – I worked as an archival producer at PBS, in those days – then take the train home to nothing.

So I developed a ritual. Every day after work, instead of going straight home to Queens, I’d take the subway to Manhattan. Sometimes to Namaste Bookshop, sometimes to crystal stores on the Upper East Side where rich women bought amethyst geodes for their foyers. I’d stand in front of walls of tumbled stones, intuitively feeling their energies, waiting for one to call to me.

And they did call.

Even knowing it was bullshit, I could feel the rose quartz promising to heal my heart, the black tourmaline offering protection, the labradorite whispering about transformation. My checking account dwindled but my apartment filled with stones. Oracle decks in candy colors featuring mermaids and unicorns. Statues of deities I barely understood. Ganesh, who Echo had assured me was “the Hindu god who specifically comes to white people.” Quan Yin for compassion I couldn’t find anywhere else.

I felt, for brief moments, holding a piece of celestite up to the light or pulling a particularly synchronistic oracle card, like I could access whatever dimension Echo lived in. Like I could be that certain, that special, that magical.

A flaw of mine that’s only become worse as I’ve aged is that I don’t admire people, I envy them. My brain runs this constant calculation, a detailed accounting of who has what and why it’s OK I don’t have it. Why the karma works out. The calculations balance, but only briefly. The envy just finds new targets, metastasizes into new resentments.

But Echo inspired something different.

Later, when I briefly joined a Wiccan coven, so did Swann, the high priestess who ran things. With them, my place in the hierarchy was so clear that envy became impossible. They were teachers, I was student. And that’s how it should be, that’s how I liked it.

I think that’s what I’m always seeking: an authority so absolute it overrides my critical brain. But it has to feel earned. The coven fell apart when I met Elder High Priestess Ravyn. She shopped at Ulta and ate at Buffalo Wild Wings. She wore those transition lenses that never quite clear up indoors. Then she’d turn around and claim she was “of the fae,” of a special bloodline, while the rest of us were just boring humans who were shut out of the higher realms. So I left that too, politely, claiming work conflicts, and never went back.

People tell me to find Christ, that I’d like it there. But I am not a Christian either. I want magic.

Every ending is a false ending. I am still in purgatory. Last month I paid $75 to lie on the ground of a repurposed office space and hyperventilate while a woman in palazzo pants played a singing bowl. I cried so hard I thought I was dying. She said that was energy blockages leaving my body.

Sometimes, unable to sleep, I’ll see someone from those days, while scrolling. Once, I saw Echo dancing across my TikTok For You page. Still posting about starseed activations and twin flame journeys and the coming age of Aquarius. She’s an astrologer now.

There is a scene from the movie Doubt that plays in my mind every day. Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, stern and certain, sitting across from Amy Adams’ young nun, Sister James. She’s spent the entire film righteous, unbending, wielding her certainty like armor. And then, in the final moment, her voice breaks.

“In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God,” Sister Aloysius says. “Of course there is a price.”

The First Noel begins to play on the organ as they sit in the snow.

“Oh, Sister James …” she says, tender for the first time in the film.

“What is it sister?”

“I have doubts. I have such doubts.”

I think about Amy Carlson’s body in that sleeping bag and about Sister Aloysius crying. Each time I think, this one could be different. Each time I imagine myself stepping into a world where human existence has a purpose. Where there is infinite goodness. The hope feels clean, almost holy, and then it goes away.

I tell myself I’ll stop looking. I never do. Still, I listen. And still, I am investigating. Always investigating.