Strange Talk About Edgar Cayce

My college was founded by the Disciples of Christ, a small Protestant denomination of Christianity that was basically an off-shoot of the Restoration Movement. I could probably do a whole post about that, but that's not what I'm going to write about right now. The Disciples of Christ have given the world some interesting, well, disciples. Some of the well-known people who came out of the Disciples of Christ have been Colonel Sanders, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand, and gay bishop Gene Robinson (before he came out and before he became Episcopalian). Also, Ronald Reagan was baptized in the church before he became a Presbyterian later on. There are two disciples though who are much more controversial though. The first is Jim Jones. Yes, that Jim Jones. A lot of people don't know this, but Jim Jones was a minister in the Disciples of Christ, beginning in 1964, and was closely affiliated with the church up to the mass suicide at Jonestown (that embarrassing debacle for the church prompted changes within its structure so that something like that wouldn't happen again).

This post isn't about Jim Jones though, it's about the other controversial disciple; Edgar Cayce. I don't know if this post can even do Edgar Cayce justice. So much has been written on Edgar Cayce, and he has had an enduring influence on the New Age movement, it's difficult to know where to even start. Some view Cayce as a 20th century mystic, while others saw him as a crank. As for what my opinion on him is, I'm pretty much in the "he was a crank" camp, especially since he was the precursor to the odious New Age movements, but he's still a fascinating figure to me regardless.

Some quick biographical information about him. Cayce's early life has little to note. He was born (1877) and raised in Kentucky, was a very devout church-goer and read the Bible every year, all that jazz. Cayce's life changed after he was struck with a pretty bad case of laryngitis, causing him to completely lose the ability to speak. A year later, 1901, a traveling hypnotist attempted to cure Cayce. According to accounts, Cayce's voice returned when he was under a trance but disappeared when he was out of it. After that, a local hypnotist continued to work with Cayce to get his voice to return, which apparently worked, but a peculiarity about the treatment was that in his trance, Cayce used the pronoun "We" instead of "I". Another peculiarity about it was that Cayce could also apparently know the symptoms and cures of other people's ailments when he was under a trance, and so he began to trance heal for free in town. Cayce's fame grew and he started to rely on voluntary donations to support himself and his family as he did his readings.

In 1923, Cayce moved on from simply trance healing to much more weightier topics, and began to delve into reincarnation and people's past lives. From 1925 until his death in 1945, Cayce worked as a professional psychic in Virginia Beach. The reason why that Cayce endures is because of some of the interesting things he predicted and the things he believed. You can find many of those prophecies here, but to sum up, a lot of them were about subjects like Atlantis and the Sphinx, and other paranormal things. Egypt frequently came up with Edgar Cayce, and he believed that records about Atlantis lay somewhere beneath the Sphinx.

Of course, there are the critics.

It's too late though to really delve into the beliefs, predictions, and followers of Edgar Cayce though, so this is a topic I will return to later. Enjoy the night you insomniac Heartlanders.