In conversations that turn to certain subjects, I ask “Do you know who Edgar Cayce was?” Almost always the answer is, “No.” I responded the same many years ago when a friend asked me. She gave me a book, Thomas Sugrue’s There Is a River, Cayce’s first biography. I read it, and my understanding of life and why we are here on Earth began changing.
Born on March 13, 1877, in a racist Kentucky town still influenced by the Civil War, Cayce felt awkward in elementary school and shared his problems with his father. An angel visited him during the night and suggested that he sleep with a book under his head. The next morning, he could recall everything in the book. He never lost this ability the rest of his life. As a teenager, he wanted to be a minister and decided to read the entire Bible every year. But he lost his voice, unable to talk above a whisper. No treatment worked until a hypnotist came to town (a new modality at the time), and desperate Cayce went to him. After experiencing this trance, Cayce’s voice returned. He soon discovered that he could hypnotize himself, but the knowledge he received included little of what he had believed as a staunch Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian. Instead of becoming a minister, he became an excellent photographer, a skill that supported him before his reputation for accurate readings changed his life’s path. Sydney D. Kirkpatrick recounts all of this and much more in his biography of 2000, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet. He tells the story of how and why Cayce became known as the “Sleeping Prophet.”
In 1905, Cayce read the health of a young girl of 6 who had not been developing normally since she was two. Doctors decided that she had a fatal disease since she was even regressing into “baby” talk. Cayce read her body and told her parents that a fall at the age of two had injured her spine. He believed simple chiropractic treatment would return her to normal. It did. In other trances, Cayce used medical terms of which he had no knowledge when he was awake that correctly described the client’s condition. His accuracy rapidly gained him a wide reputation with people soon clamoring for readings. His fame allowed him to establish ARE, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, after he relocated to Virginia Beach, Virginia. His wife helped him, and, eventually, Gladys Davis (Turner) became his secretary, keeping meticulous verbatim records of his readings (all of which are catalogued and categorized at ARE). Because of her assiduousness, many researchers have written books about the various topics that Cayce covered in his 14, 145 readings for 5,744 people. For the last 14 years of his life, he could do readings without going into a trance. His guides told him to do no more than two readings a day toward the end of his life, but he worried that people needed his readings. He did not listen, reading up to six people a day. He “burnt” himself out devoting himself to helping others.
Cayce’s readings told him that “mind is the builder” and that “thoughts are things.” In essence, he was one of the first mediums to gain respect for presenting information beyond space and time, including information about reincarnation. Even then, police arrested him as a charlatan after he had gained renown. A well-known citizen identified Cayce, and he was immediately released.
He did not need to have the subject in the room with him. He could identify the problem at a distance. The one reading in Cayce’s detailed biographies that convinced me of Cayce’s ability involved a woman who had written him about her condition, frantic (as were all his subjects) to find a cure. He told her to go to her local drug store for a particular medicine. She went, but the druggist said that he had not sold that drug for years. When she told Cayce, he responded that the druggist needed to look on the left side near the back of the top shelf of his bookcase. The disbelieving druggist climbed his ladder, and the medicine was there. It cured the woman. Cayce wanted people to have well-being and never made extra money with his ability. He could have “played” the stock market, but he refused. He understood that consciousness exists before birth and after death, and that death is merely a shift from one frequency to another. Other myriad examples only add to the evidence that certifies him as a true seer. Contemporary researcher Stephan Schwartz thinks that Cayce’s work is an excellent body of non-local consciousness examples.
Cayce also predicted many things that have since come to pass—both before his death on January 3, 1945, and after. He noted that Atlantis had disappeared 10,000 years ago and was located near the island of Bimini. In 171 of his readings, in the early 1930s, he described the Essenes at Qumran, long before the Dead Sea Scrolls started appearing in 1946. He knew about that sect and the integral role of women at the time. He also recounted the life of Jesus after he disappeared from Bible stories at age twelve until becoming an adult. Jesus had traveled to India where he learned about Hinduism and Buddhism; Cayce identified himself as one of Jesus’s friends in that past life.
Many consider Cayce to be the father of holistic medicine. Over 9,000 of his readings were concerned with health and healing. The health treatments he repeatedly suggested were castor oil packs, diet change to fewer fried foods and more vegetables and fruits, as well as massage. (ARE has a massage school on its grounds in Virginia Beach.) He predicted that doctors would soon be able to identify various illnesses in one drop of blood. But his healing went further than the physical. He felt that humans were living in an artificially limited state of consciousness. They did not understand that the consciousness one has for well-being of the world creates social consciousness such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King espoused after Cayce’s death. Cayce realized that when people try to foster well-being, they discover that are part of the whole universe; they are interdependent.
Humans have the power to influence their physical reality through personal spirituality, holistic health, dreams, finding their life’s purpose, reincarnation, intuition, meditation, mindful living, the Akashic records, and the ancient mysteries. Cayce believed that humans should aspire to be helpful to others by eating properly (alkaline foods, pure water), meditation with attunement to the universal, and understanding their responsibility to others. That would be success, not money or prestige.
Cayce also predicted the telegraph, the telephone, Western Union, and Westinghouse. Cayce suggested to his wealthy friends that they should get out of the stock market before the crash in 1929. Those who did kept their money. He foretold of the Depression in 1931 while noting that it would ease in 1933. On May 28, 1926, he suggested that temperatures in deep ocean currents would indicate the weather—Niño and Niña not yet known. He predicted that Hitler would rise to power in 1935 and that only a war among many countries would be his downfall. Not until World War II was he defeated.
If you are interested in the myriad subjects about which Cayce spoke, consult edgarcayce.org to find out more about this remarkable man and the legacy he left.