HBO just showed a documentary about the "Love Has Won" cult in three one-hour segments. It was based around a woman named Amy Carlson who became convinced she was God and managed to convince her followers to believe the same. They called her "Mother God" and just plain old "Mom."
Carlson had a dysfunctional childhood -- divorced parents, abused by her stepmother -- and ended up marrying three times at a young age and having two children. In 2007 she abruptly left her children one day without saying anything and never saw them again as she moved to rural Colorado and teamed up with an older man who was called "Father God." There were various Father Gods after the first one and Carlson apparently took each as her lover.
What's impressive about this documentary is that it isn't the usual narrator telling viewers what to think about a group on the fringes. The cult was constantly filming themselves and regularly streaming on the internet, and various primary members are interviewed but allowed to just say what they say without anyone judging it or, again, telling viewers what to think. The fact that this was a small, batshit crazy cult speaks for itself without anyone having to say it during the documentary.
Over time, Carlson's always happy demeanor became darker. The cult always excused this by saying she was in constant pain because humanity wouldn't see and accept her as the Divine Goddess she was, there to liberate them. She was a very heavy drinker, smoked weed regularly, and she and the rest of the cult members swore like drunken sailors as the old expression goes.
One of the selling points of the cult was that "Mom" was going to "ascend," like Jesus. She claimed to have been Jesus and many other famous figures in past lives. The big beautiful clouds where they lived were believed to be spaceships hovering, getting ready to take "Mom" to wherever.
But her health got worse and worse. Eventually she couldn't walk. Her form of medicine was to ingest large amounts of colloidal silver every day along with her heavy drinking. She eventually became discolored and paralyzed. But her acoloytes continued to insist this was because of mankind rejecting her and they never took her to a regular doctor or hospital.
The group believed a concoction of new age beliefs combined with QAnon type stuff. Carlson was eventually moved to Oregon, back to Colorado and then to Hawaii, where she claimed to be the Hawaiian god Pele. This caused outraged locals to strongly demonstrate outside where they were living and they quickly scurried away to California, where Carlson died in a hotel room in April of 2021. She was only 45 years old. They transported her body back to Colorado as they still waited for her to "ascend" and eventually the local sheriff and law enforcement found her mummified corpse as it lay in a bed as cult members continued to sit by her side.
Several of the primary members, there was never more than 10 or 20 hard-core ones who lived with "Mom" at various times, still carry on the cult, though of course with the obligatory factionalism. I had never heard of this small group before. Very bizarre but worth a watch if you're interested in this kind of crazy stuff because the documentary is well done.