The Essential Edgar Cayce Read online

  [That night] I was not yet asleep when the vision first began, but I felt as if I were being lifted up. A glorious light as of the rising morning sun seemed to fill the whole room, and a figure appeared at the foot of my bed. I was sure it was my mother, and I called to her, but she didn’t answer. For the moment I was frightened, climbed out of bed, and went to my mother’s room. No, she hadn’t called. Almost immediately after I returned to my couch, the figure came again. Then it seemed all gloriously bright—an angel, or what, I knew not; but gently, patiently, it said, “Thy prayers are heard. You will have your wish. Remain faithful. Be true to yourself. Help the sick, the afflicted.”

  The very next evening, the remarkable capacity of his mind began to show itself. Heretofore, Cayce had not been a particularly good student, sometimes even being punished for forgetting his lessons. But that night, as Leslie grilled Edgar on his lessons, Edgar intuitively felt the need to take a short nap. Falling asleep after having just studied, intuition seemed to tell him, would make a big difference in his ability to retain knowledge. And, in fact, it did. He began to demonstrate a kind of “photographic memory”—ironic, perhaps, given his later career as a portrait photographer. As he wrote in his memoirs, “From that day on, I had little trouble in school, for I would read my lesson, sleep on it a few seconds, and then be able to repeat every word of it.” Cayce had begun a journey of self-discovery that would link falling asleep to tapping in to his mind’s potential. At this stage, it merely facilitated reconnecting with what he had studied already. But in his early adult years, he would find that he could connect to deeper, more mysterious wisdom within his reach.

  A hint of this talent came at age fifteen when Cayce was playing baseball with other boys and he was hit accidentally by a thrown ball at the base of the spine. In the hours immediately after, he exhibited erratic behavior—giggling, laughing, making faces, even standing in the middle of the road stopping buggies with his upraised hands. Just as Edgar was about to fall asleep that night, he announced that a poultice of cornmeal, onions, and some herbs should be administered to the back of his skull to counteract the shock sustained from the injury. His parents followed his instructions—virtually, his first medical reading—and following a night’s sleep he was normal once again. Little did anyone realize then how this medical clairvoyance would foreshadow the work he would pursue later as an adult.

  In 1901, when he was twenty-four years old, Edgar happened serendipitously upon his talent for tapping in to the wisdom of the unconscious mind. It was at this time that he met and fell in love with Gertrude Evans, his future wife and mother of their three sons (one of whom died as an infant), and an ardent supporter of his life’s work. But in this first year of the new century, he was stricken with an ailment that threatened to undermine his current career as a traveling salesman—and, even more alarmingly, his long-term hopes of becoming a minister in the church someday.

  A severe case of laryngitis plagued Cayce for months and baffled doctors. In the end, it proved responsive only to hypnosis. When hypnotized, Edgar could not only talk again but was able to diagnose the cause and prescribe a treatment to effect a lasting cure.

  Some months later, Cayce tried out his diagnostic and prescriptive skills on other people to remarkable effect. And so began his work—albeit, for many years only occasional—as an intuitive healer.

  Edgar Cayce quickly found that a hypnotist wasn’t needed to access his unconscious wisdom. Following an interlude of prayer, he could move into this state on his own. It was a fragile, vulnerable condition because his unconscious was wide open, he said; hence, his insistence that a family member be present to direct the experience, to act as what came to be called the conductor of the reading, because on more than one occasion people tried to take advantage of his gift. Usually, Gertrude or his elder son, Hugh Lynn, served in this role.

  Typically, when giving a reading, Cayce first lead the others with him—the conductor, the stenographer, and sometimes the person(s) for whom the reading was being given—in prayer. Then he would lie down on a couch on his back, close his eyes, and place his hands on his forehead. The conductor would then read aloud a hypnotic-like suggestion tailored to the type of reading desired. For example, for a physical health reading the suggestions might be: “You will go over this body carefully, examine it thoroughly, and tell me the conditions you find at the present time; giving the cause of the existing conditions, also suggestions for help and relief of this body; answering the questions, as I ask them.” On the other hand, for a reading addressing reincarnation and the purposes of life currently, the suggestion might be:

  “You will give the relation of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, giving time, place and the name, and that in each life which built or retarded the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the entity in the present, that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions, as I ask them.”

  Listening to the suggestion, Cayce would allow himself to move into a trancelike, meditative state, and he would move his hands down from his forehead to cover his solar plexus. To observers in the room, it appeared that he had fallen asleep. But he was not asleep, and he would begin to address the request posed in the suggestion. After an opening discourse that may or may not be brief—sometimes only a minute in length, other times as long as twenty minutes or more—Edgar then would invite questions for further elaboration. The reading would end when he would announce “We are through for the present,” at which point the conductor read aloud a suggestion that Cayce regain normal consciousness and he would slowly awake, much like a person awakening from a nap.

  Because Cayce was unable to remember what he had said, the stenographer would transcribe every word recorded so that Cayce could review the reading for himself. Then a transcript would be forwarded to the subject of the reading. Sometimes Cayce maintained a correspondence with the individual in which he added his own conscious interpretive comments or advice. On occasion, the stenographer was not sure about a word uttered by Cayce, and therefore she inserted a bracketed reference to an alternative word—for example, in reading 281-13 found in chapter 3: “. . . that which shadows [shatters?] much in the experiences of others.”

  The source of the information that came through Edgar Cayce’s readings is an important issue. Although Cayce sometimes has been labeled a medium, or a channeler of psychic information, he insisted that it was almost never some external source speaking or channeling through him; in other words, it was not some deceased soul or some enlightened master broadcasting from beyond in the spiritual world. Instead, the origin of the information—what Cayce called the source—was his own superconscious, or universal, mind, a level of awareness from which all experience up to that time is accessible and from which the solution to any problem is available. In fact, Cayce often stated that all of us potentially have access to this superconsciousness if we can only learn how to access it.

  It should be noted that there were some dozen rare occasions on which a voice spoke through Cayce that identified itself as something other than Cayce’s superconsciousness. Most were in the 1930s, and it was frequently the Archangel Michael claiming to speak through Cayce, usually admonishing Cayce and his followers to practice in their own lives the very teachings promoted by Cayce. And in 1934, yet another being spoke through Cayce, offering to become the source of the readings thereafter. After careful consideration, however, Cayce decided that he was not interested in such an offer.

  As curious as this methodology surely was—although today, in the early twenty-first century, an era of psychics on every corner, it doesn’t sound quite so strange—it was the content of what he said in his readings that is most important. Holistic, natural approaches to healing were advocated, and any illness was essentially a body, mind, spirit phenomenon and healing must happen in all three areas.
Over the many years in which Edgar Cayce gave medical readings, he finally received the credit due him in an article published in 1979 in The Journal of the American Medical Association: “The roots of present-day holism probably go back 100 years to the birth of Edgar Cayce in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.”

  Nineteen twenty-three, when Edgar was forty-six years old, was an important turning point in his life. During this new phase of his work, he discovered that he was capable of clairvoyant discourses on a whole range of nonmedical topics as well. It was in September of that year that Gladys Davis, all of eighteen years of age, came into Cayce’s life and served as his secretary/stenographer for the rest of his life.

  Edgar Cayce was befriended at this time by several wealthy individuals who supported his move to Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1925, where his full-time pursuit of his spiritual gifts began in earnest. Edgar’s own life readings indicated that Virginia Beach would be ideal for him; it was near a large body of water, in close proximity to the nation’s capital, and he predicted tremendous growth in the decades to come. What’s more, he had had a significant past-life experience there several centuries earlier and it would feel like home to him.

  But the next twenty years were difficult times for the Cayce family. Not only was it no easy task trying to be a full-time clairvoyant healer and spiritual philosopher seventy years ago, but the Great Depression and World War II tended to direct national attention toward priorities other than exploring the extrasensory. Nevertheless, Cayce and his supporters made several attempts to establish institutions and a school that embodied the readings.

  In that regard, the Cayce Hospital of Research and Enlightenment was founded in Virginia Beach in 1928. Here was a courageous pioneering effort to launch a body-mind-spirit healing facility. But after only two years, it collapsed financially. The same fate befell an advanced educational program Cayce cofounded called Atlantic University. It, too, shut its doors after only two years (only to open again in 1985, exactly forty years after Cayce’s death).

  The remaining years of Edgar Cayce’s life were similarly difficult, with the family usually teetering on the brink of poverty. With the close of Atlantic University and the demise of both the Cayce hospital and the Association of National Investigators—the organization that had supervised the hospital’s development—a few core supporters remained to gather around Cayce. In 1931, they created a new organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, which made Cayce’s clairvoyant services available to members for a fee of twenty dollars. It was no small sum in the Depression era, and it was the principal means by which Cayce supported himself and his family. Yet many of the readings during this time were free of charge because people just didn’t have the money.

  In 1932, some of Cayce’s most ardent followers worked with him to found a study group program. Over the next eleven years, the group received 130 readings on character development and spiritual growth topics. These readings were summarized in essays written by group members and published in a two-volume set titled A Search for God. Topics included “Know Thyself,” “Faith,” “Patience,” and “Wisdom.” In the decades following Edgar Cayce’s death, this program has grown into one of the most important aspects of his legacy, with hundreds of ongoing groups in the United States and in more than thirty countries worldwide.

  The 1930s were complicated for Cayce not only because of depressed economic conditions but also because of difficulties finding recognition for his work. Parapsychology was a budding science, with pioneers such as J. B. Rhine, who had been trained as a botanist but conducted groundbreaking research in psychic ability through the department of psychology at Duke University. There was some passing interest in Cayce’s gifts expressed by a handful of scientists, but these gifts were in turn expressed in probably too anecdotal and uncontrolled a fashion for them. They were much more interested in proving the veracity of ESP under laboratory conditions.

  And so Edgar Cayce had to look to less scientific pathways to gain acceptance. His son Hugh Lynn moved to New York City in 1938 to help produce a regular radio series titled Mysteries of the Mind, to help generate interest in psychic ability generally and in his father’s work particularly. Broadcast on WOR, the programs dealt with various psychic experiences in a dramatized form, but they met with only marginal success.

  It wasn’t until the early 1940s that the mainstream press became aware of Cayce’s gifts. Marguerite Bro, a renowned theologian and author, came to Virginia Beach to personally investigate what she had heard about Cayce’s intuitive healing powers and came away so impressed that she published an article about him in 1942 in Coronet magazine, one of the most widely read periodicals of the time. Letters of inquiry and requests for readings began to pour in.

  But an even more significant publishing event gave Cayce’s work something that had been long sought. In 1943, the lengthy and beautifully written biography of Cayce, There Is a River, was published by Henry Holt. Penned by newspaper reporter and family friend Thomas Sugrue, the book marked a watershed in the public’s appreciation of Cayce’s achievements. Widely praised, it resulted in an even greater influx of requests for readings—a demand beyond anything Cayce himself could keep up with.

  Sadly, Edgar Cayce was not able to enjoy these publishing milestones for very long. With both of his sons serving overseas as soldiers in World War II, he and his small circle of supporters did the best they could to deal with the newfound deluge of interest. But, now in his mid-sixties, Edgar’s health was not robust, and with his fervent efforts to keep abreast of the new demands in his work—sometimes involving giving more than ten readings in a single day—it began to deteriorate. There were warning signs as to how detrimental this output could really be to his health, but the warning signs were largely ignored.

  Nineteen forty-four was a catastrophic year for Cayce’s health. Early in the year, he contracted pneumonia. Later, he suffered a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed. After one especially debilitating episode, he spent three months at a recuperative facility in Roanoke, Virginia, but there was little improvement and he was brought back home to Virginia Beach in December 1944. There, he was diagnosed with pulmonary edema, which led to his death on January 3, 1945.

  AFTER EDGAR CAYCE’S DEATH

  In spite of the many frustrations and challenges of his life, Edgar Cayce left an extraordinary legacy in the thousands of discourses. Indeed, he became far better known to the public after his death than when he was alive and doing his work. A considerable amount of attention was focused on just several dozen readings—a number significantly less than one percent of the total number of readings—because they dealt with prophecies for the years 1958 through 1998, and, to a lesser extent, prophecies for the twenty-first century and beyond.

  Many of the prophecies sounded a dire note, warning of rather catastrophic geological events and severe changes in the earth that never came to pass. These images of the world in turmoil became the centerpiece of a landmark best-seller about Edgar Cayce published in 1967, The Sleeping Prophet, in which author and newspaper reporter Jess Stearn captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers. In the years following Cayce’s death until the book’s publication, the organization he founded in 1931, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), had grown very slowly but steadily under the tireless leadership of Hugh Lynn Cayce. But with the publication of Stearn’s book, interest swelled, not unlike what happened in 1943 with the publication of There Is a River, and membership in ARE increased dramatically, the number of active study groups increased fourfold in three years, and an entire series of books about the readings were published by mainstream publishers both in the United States and abroad.

  Even though it was Cayce’s prophecies that initially captured the public’s attention, other readings began attracting growing interest. The physical health readings—some nine thousand of them—were by far the largest category. In between were the “life readings,” dream interpretation reading
s, and readings offering spiritual advice and even business advice—each numbering in the hundreds, or, in the case of the life readings, nearly two thousand. The life readings were in-depth character analyses addressed to specific individuals to help them see the purpose of their lives; they also included Cayce’s views on the mission of the soul in this life as well as the next, and his views on reincarnation.

  From early on in Edgar Cayce’s career as a clairvoyant, it was clear that his discourses should be recorded in writing. At first, notes were taken in a rather haphazard manner; later, a stenographic transcript was compiled, the vast majority of which was accomplished by longtime secretary Gladys Davis. Years later, the readings were numbered, both to protect the privacy of the recipient and to facilitate research and publication. The name of the individual (or, in some instances, the group) was assigned a case number; and because many people received multiple readings, a second number was assigned to indicate a given reading’s place in sequence. For example, Cayce’s own son Hugh Lynn, who received dozens of readings over the years, was assigned case number “341,” so the thirty-first reading he received was numbered “341-31.” (It is included here in chapter 3, “Healthy Living.” The numbering system is employed throughout this book.)