How It All Began
On May 20, 1941, Edgar Cayce was “asleep” in his home at Virginia Beach, engaged in a reading that was being conducted by his son Hugh Lynn. This reading was uniquely different from others. Over the years, Edgar Cayce had, during Life readings, made frequent references to the Essenes, a group about which the man had no conscious knowledge. It was decided, therefore, that a series of readings should be done on the Essenes themselves in order to collect some information about them for students of history and religion.
Early in the reading, Hugh Lynn Cayce asked, “What is the correct meaning of the term ‘Essene’?”
Edgar Cayce said, “Expectancy.”
Biblical scholars generally agree that the earliest reference to a Messiah is in Genesis 3:15. In this passage, the Lord God is addressing the serpent that tempted Eve to eat the apple. The language differs in various Bibles but, in general, it is: “And I will establish a feud between you and the woman, between your seed and hers; (it or she) is to crush your head while you do lie in wait at (its or her) heel.” Whether “it” or “she,” the reference, exegetes agree, is to the “seed” of Eve, the first woman, in the personage of Jesus Christ. The Edgar Cayce readings, as will be shown, present this idea in a different but not contradictory light.
The expectancy of a redeeming personage is mentioned frequently in the Bible, usually indirectly. For example, to Abraham the Lord God said, “In thee all the races of the world shall find a blessing.” This is interpreted as meaning that the redeemer would be a descendant of Abraham. Abraham is considered to be the first Hebrew; to him it was revealed that there is one God. Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob all regarded Canaan as the land of the Hebrews, though they did not all live there themselves. While the Hebrews were in Goshen, in northeast Egypt, Jacob (who was also called Israel) divided the Hebrews into twelve tribes, naming his sons to head the tribes.
To his son Judah, Jacob said, “Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise; thy hand shall be at the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee … The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until he comes who is to be sent.”
Canaan was later partitioned by tribes by Joshua, successor to Moses after the Exodus, and to the Tribe of Judah went the area that now includes Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. Solomon was of the Tribe of Judah. So was David. Speaking through the Prophet Nathan, the Lord God told David to build Him a house where His people could settle, and He said:
“And when thy days be fulfilled and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father and he shall be my son.”
Mary, the mother of Jesus, was of the House of David. So was Joseph, her husband. So important was this genealogy that it comprises the first passages of the Gospel, establishing the lineage from Abraham to Jesus and allowing the first Christians to claim that Jesus was the expected Messiah promised to Abraham.
Placing these events in time would be difficult—impossible, in fact. According to the traditional Jewish calendar, God created the world—and the Adam and Eve—about 5730 years ago. That would be about 3761 B.C. In terms of science, this is hardly acceptable. Archaeologists have determined that early Homo sapiens were living in the caves of Mount Carmel at least 35,000 years ago. Scientists have found bones belonging to a species of Homo erectus that lived 1.9 million years ago. Factors like these contribute to the conflict between science and religion, with the weight of truth moving increasingly to the side of science. Clearly, some modifications in religion become necessary, and some have been made. For example, Pope Pius XII stated that it was up to the individual Roman Catholic to believe either in Evolution or in Divine Creation as depicted in Genesis; but, he said, Catholics were required to believe that at some point God gave Man his soul. The Edgar Cayce readings suggest that both Creation and Evolution are at work in the universe.
According to the readings, God did create the world in the evolutionary pattern suggested in Genesis. However, the process did not take six days; it took, say, eons. Man became a product of this evolution. But God did not give Man his soul. Souls decided to inhabit the human creature as a means of experiencing the earth for themselves.
During the Exodus, God told Moses that His name was Yahweh, meaning, “I am who am.” Now that Yahweh was filling His promise to make Canaan the land of the Jews, only Yahweh was to be worshipped there. However, things did not work out that way. Canaan (approximately the former Palestine) was already occupied by Semitic peoples of various backgrounds. There were kings and priests in their palaces and temples, with their own governments and gods. Thus, the Jews had to fight their way into their homeland and they had to fight to keep it. And they fought among themselves. Soon after the twelve tribes were settled in Canaan, around 1035 B.C., they argued among themselves, with those in the north forming the Kingdom of Israel and those in the south forming the Kingdom of Judah. Neither kingdom could avoid being profoundly influenced by the cultures already existing all around them, any more than they could avoid wars with them. For that matter, there were times when each Jewish kingdom allied itself with pagans in wars against the other.
The influence became even more intimate when Ahab, prince of Israel, married Jezebel, princess of Phoenicia and worshiper of Baal, chief of the pagan gods. When Ahab became king, it was Jezebel, as queen, who really ruled the country. She imported hundreds of Baal priests and installed them on Mount Carmel, which overlooks the Mediterranean at what is now the city of Haifa. The mass invasion of idol worshipers into the land of Yahweh stirred the wrath of the Prophet Elijah. Elijah holds an important position in the philosophy that has evolved from the Edgar Cayce readings.
He was born around 876 B.C. at Tishbeh in Gilead. The town no longer exists, but the region was to the southeast of the Sea of Galilee. Early in life, he felt called to serve Yahweh. He spent his youth in the desert, fasting, wearing rough, shaggy clothes. He lived for a while in a cave on Mount Carmel, where there was a school of prophets: It was a house of study, actually. Besides their spiritual exercises, the prophets made copies of the sacred books for posterity. From time to time, they traveled across the countryside, joyously acclaiming that Yahweh was God.
It was to displace these men and to dilute their religion that Queen Jezebel sent the Baal priests to Mount Carmel. Either the Yahwists left to save their lives or they were killed. In time, only Elijah remained on the mountain. When Elijah left, he went in anger to Samarai, to the palace of Ahab, and he said to the king, “You are going to have to make up your mind which foot you’re going to dance on. Either you are a Yahwist or a Baalist.”
Strongly influenced by his wife, Ahab was unable to make up his mind, and so a contest was agreed upon. Two bullocks were taken to Mount Carmel and placed on altars. A great crowd watched as the priests gathered at one altar and called upon Baal repeatedly to prove his godship by setting the animal on fire with a flame from heaven. Nothing happened. Then Elijah stepped to his altar and put the same request to Yahweh. Immediately great flames appeared over the altar and the bullock was quickly burned to ashes. The people cried out, “Yahweh is God! Yahweh is God!” The Baal priests were killed. The Yahweh prophets returned to Mount Carmel.
Infuriated by the setback, Jezebel intensified her persecution of Yahwists. Elijah announced that Yahweh would punish her by bringing a three-year drought upon the land, and this happened. During the drought, Yahweh kept Elijah in food by having ravens bring him bread and meat every morning. In Zarophath, Elijah was fed by a widow whose food he miraculously multiplied and whose son he returned from the dead.
Throughout his life, Elijah fought the pagan invasion of Israel. Through his influence, new men rose to power in Jerusalem and Damascus, and they eventually overcame the threat by conquering the country.
Elijah chose as his disciple Elisha, a well-to-do farmer. Elisha also lived at Mount Carmel for a while, and it was he who accompanied Elijah to Jericho. The time had come for Elijah to complete his sojourn in this world, and they both knew it. At the Jordan, Elijah parted the waters with his mantle, which, it was said, was the source of his powers. And then he gave the mantle to Elisha. There appeared to them a chariot of flames, drawn by horses of flames. Elijah boarded the chariot and was borne away into the sky in a great wind.
The school of the prophets remained on Mount Carmel as the centuries unfolded toward Christ. Other things in the country changed a great deal. At times, even the attitude toward the expected Messiah changed. Yahweh’s chosen people had their eras of glory, but again and again, the country was conquered by its enemies, the cities were leveled, the people enslaved. Perhaps for this reason the attitude developed among many Jews that the expected Messiah would come as a great king who would unite the people and lead them to ultimate and lasting triumph. Even some of the prophets referred to him in this way. With time, the Messiah took on the role of an anticipated national hero in many minds.
With time, too, three “parties” or sects developed in the country, and they were all in existence when Jesus Christ was born. The most numerous group were the Pharisees. When, about two hundred years before Christ, the spiritual leaders of Judea became lax, the pious Jews who continued to adhere strictly to the commandments became known as Assideans, which was derived from the Hebrew word Hasidim or Chassidim, meaning pious. When the Maccabees family organized a revolt against the leaders, the Assideans joined the fighting; but when the revolt became more political than religious, the Assideans withdrew. When the Maccabees devolved into the Hasmoneans, the Assideans became known as Pharisees—separatists—and they were persecuted. Though Queen Alexandra was Hasmonean, she favored the Pharisees. Under her reign, they were the real leaders of the country, a position they retained after the Roman occupation in 63 B.C.
Priests, laity and most of the scribes were Pharisees. In addition to believing in Mosaic Law, they believed that interpretations of the Law by the scribes were equally valid. They placed religion above politics, feeling they could live with any government that did not restrict religious freedom. For this reason, they not only got along well with the Romans, but had even asked the Romans to take over the country during the Hasmonean dynasty. Believing that Yahweh was their king as well as God, many Pharisees experienced conflict in paying tribute to their pagan conquerors, and it was Jesus who told them to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s and unto God the things that were God’s. Pharisees believed in the immortality of the soul, retribution in the afterlife, the resurrection of the just, angels, spirits and Divine Providence. They accepted the doctrine of God’s cooperation in human acts; they also believed in free will and moral responsibility. They believed that the Messiah would restore the Davidic dynasty and free Jews from foreign domination.
Another of the three parties at the time of Jesus were the Sadducees. Never numerous, they were nevertheless influential because their members included the nobility, the wealthy and the higher-ranking priests. At the time of the Roman occupation, the high priest of the Sanhedrin was a Sadducee. Scholars regard the Sadducees as more Hellenistic than Hebrew. One reason may be that whenever life at home became too restrictive, most Sadducees could afford to go to the countries to the north, where there was already a heavy Hellenistic influence. The Sadducees, for example, did not believe in retribution or resurrection. They held to the Sheol concept: there was a place in the earth where the dead went, without judgment Sadducees did not believe in angels or spirits. They accepted the Mosaic Law but not the scribal interpretations. While the Sadducees rejected answered prayer, Divine guidance and Divine Providence, they did accept free will.
Some exegetes see the Sadducees as the spiritual heirs of the Priest King Melchizedek, who blessed Abraham and was paid tithes by him. That the father of all Israel should pay homage to Melchizedek suggests to some experts that the priest-king was the precursor of the personage mentioned in Psalms who would be a King of Israel and a priest after the order of Melchizedek, the same personage identified in the Epistle to the Hebrews as Jesus Christ. By tradition, Melchizedek did not die but was raised to heaven. At the time of Jesus, the Sadducees did not accept the idea of a Davidic Messiah because David was post-Mosaic and not mentioned in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Any belief they might have had in a priestly Messiah was probably diluted by their Hellenistic contacts for generations. To the Pharisees, Jesus of Nazareth could not have been the Messiah because He had come on to the public scene as a carpenter instead of a king; to the Sadducees, He was a political rabble-rouser who had to be crushed in order to protect their own position.
It is puzzling to students of history and students of religion that the third party or sect in existence at the time of Jesus is not mentioned in the New Testament at all—the Essenes. Both the Pharisees and the Sadducees repeatedly come under criticism by the authors of the New Testament, but there is not a word about the Essenes, good or bad. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavation of the house of studies at Qumran have stirred considerable conjecture about the Essene role in Judea at the time of Jesus but there has been little agreement. There has been, in fact, some disagreement as to the meaning of the word Essenes itself. Some scholars feel that Essenes and Assideans have the same derivation—Hasidim: pious. Others associate the term with Hassaim—silent. Other suggestions: the bathers, the builders, the men of action, the chaste, the vision-seers. In any event, it can hardly be an accident, a coincidence or an oversight that the Essenes are absent from the pages of the Bible. Josephus Flavius (A.D. 37-100?), the Jewish historian, rated the Essene sect in the same category with the Pharisees and Sadducees. A Pharisee himself, he lived at an Essene house of studies for a year; and in his appraisal of the three sects, the Essenes clearly get the most sympathetic treatment.
What happened, then?
What was there about the Essenes that perhaps led the authors of the New Testament to ignore them?
On the other hand, what was there about the Essenes that perhaps led subsequent editors of the New Testament to edit them out?
The Metropolitan Samuel could not find a buyer for his scrolls. He had a contract with the American School of Oriental Research, in Jerusalem, to publish photographs of his scrolls, and he was to receive half the profits. After five years in the U. S., the contract had brought him less than five hundred dollars. Exhibits in museums had brought him a bit more. The main roadblock to the sale was the complaint by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities that the scrolls were stolen property. Though no legal action was instigated, the Jordan government warned the Metropolitan of such steps if he tried to return to his monastery, then in the Arab held section of Jerusalem. As things were, buyers evidently were not interested. Another roadblock was the fact that publication of the photographs decreased the value of the scrolls. Certainly, as antiquities, the scrolls were a treasure; but scholars who might otherwise have pressured universities or museums to buy the scrolls for them to study could now study the pictures, and thus this pressure did not develop. For five years, then, the scrolls spent most of the time in a safety deposit vault in a bank in Hackensack, New Jersey, where Metropolitan Samuel was living in an Assyrian neighborhood.
In the summer of 1954, General Yigael Yadin came to the United States to raise funds for Israel. He knew, of course, that the scrolls were here. For him they held great value not only in terms of science and scholarship but mainly in terms of history: they were documents written by his forefathers. Reportedly, Yadin wrote to Metropolitan Samuel and did not get an answer. This would be understandable. Yadin was a Zionist Jew; the Metropolitan was a Christian Arab. Then a strange thing happened. This ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal:
THE FOUR DEAD SEA SCROLLS
Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 2000 B.C. are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.
Keeping himself in the background, General Yadin used intermediaries to negotiate the purchase at a price of $250,000. At first, the Israeli government provided $150,000, with the rest coming from the American Fund for Israeli Institutions; but then D. Samuel Gottesman, a New York businessman, repaid both sources and offered the scrolls as a personal gift to Israel. Sometime over the next several months, the scrolls were taken secretly to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and into the care of Professor Sukenik. The Metropolitan Samuel, meanwhile, had placed the money into a trust, which was to be administered by members of his church for religious and educational projects.
On February 13, 1955, the Israeli Premier Moshe Sharett announced that all the scrolls taken in 1947 by the Bedouins from what had become known as Cave One at Wadi Qumran were now reunited at Hebrew University and would be put into a special museum to be called the Shrine of the Book.
There were, in all, eleven scrolls; but they comprised seven manuscripts, and it is for this reason that they are called the Seven Dead Sea Scrolls. Actually, there were only six compositions, since two of the scrolls, one obtained by the Metropolitan and the other by Sukenik, are the same—the Book of Isaiah. However, these scrolls, priceless though they are, are only a fraction of additional scrolls and fragments, which were subsequently found in other caves at Qumran and elsewhere along the western shores of the Dead Sea.
After the news got out about the first findings in the caves, the Jordanian government closed off the entire area and turned it into a military zone. The only people allowed freedom of movement in and out of the zone were the Bedouins of the Ta’amire tribe. They were given, in a sense, a monopoly on cave hunting into history, and they have flourished on it. Over the years, they have brought in all or parts of over four hundred manuscripts, from which scientists have pieced together the entire Old Testament except the Book of Esther. Many non-Bible documents have been found, and, in a way, they are of even greater value. By agreement with the government, the Bedouins continued taking their finds to the cobbler Kanda in Bethlehem, who in turn sold them to the Jordanian-owned Palestine Archaeological Museum in Old Jerusalem. In twenty years, close to $500,000 was paid, although nobody knows how much of it reached the Bedouins. The money came in part from the Jordanian government and in part from museums and foundations interested in the research.
Early on, one expert, Professor John Marco Allegro, of Manchester University, England, suggested that there was some apprehension about what the scrolls might actually reveal. In Harper’s Magazine, August 1966, he stated:
The very scholars who should be most capable of working on the documents and interpreting them have displayed a not altogether surprising, but nonetheless curious, reluctance to go to the heart of their matter. The scholars appear to have held back from making discoveries which, there is evidence to believe may upset a great many basic teachings of the Christian church. This in turn would greatly upset many Christian theologians and believers. The heart of the matter is, in fact, the source and originality of Christian doctrine.
Edgar Cayce would have gone along with that.
Edgar Cayce said, “I do not make any claims for myself. I do feel from experience that through the readings, as may be obtained through me from time to time while in an unconscious state, those lessons, those suggestions, are presented which, if applied in the inner life of the individual to whom they are directed, will give a clearer, a more perfect understanding of physical, mental and spiritual ills. But you must judge for yourself. Facts and results are the measuring rods.”
Edgar Cayce was his own best measuring rod.
He was born on March 18, 1877, on a farm in Western Kentucky, and it was a Sunday. One day when he was still a small boy, he went out to the nearby woods to watch a log-chopper at work. The man jokingly remarked that he had the strength of Samson. The boy did not know what that meant, so he asked. The man explained that he had attended a revival meeting the previous evening, at which the preacher spoke about the strengths God could give people, as He had given Samson the strength to destroy a building with his bare hands thus beginning the liberation of Israel from the Philistines. Intrigued, young Edgar went home and asked his mother to read him the story from the Bible. Locating in the Book of Judges, she read it to him, and he thought it was the most exciting thing he ever heard. From then on, he often asked his mother to read the Bible to him. When he was old enough to be taken to church, it was the Bible stories the preachers told that held him in utter fascination. He started school when he was seven.
When he was ten and could read, he asked for and was given a Bible of his own. In the woods, at a bend of the stream, was a quiet, lonely place where he could spend all the free hours his life allowed him, and he would read the Bible. One evening that summer, a guest happened to disclose that he read the Bible through completely once a year. Edgar admired this. There and then he vowed that not only would he, too, read the Bible once a year for the rest of his life, but he would also begin that night reading it rapidly to make up for the years of his life he had already lived. It took him over two years to catch up with himself.
On a May afternoon of his thirteenth year, Edgar was again at his favorite place in the woods, now into the thirteenth reading of his favorite book. He had reached, perhaps by chance, the Book of Judges, and he was reading the story of Samson, the first Bible story he ever heard. Suddenly he became aware that he was not alone. He looked over his shoulder, into the sunlight, and he saw a woman. At first be thought that it was his mother, fetching him for his chores. Then be realized that it was someone else, and it seemed that she had wings on her back.
She said, “Your prayers have been heard. Tell me what you would like most of all, so that I may give it to you.”
He stared at her in disbelief for what seemed a long time, and then be said, “Most of all I would like to be helpful to others and especially to children when they are sick.”
The woman vanished.
Edgar went home and told his mother what had happened, and he asked, “Do you think I’ve been reading the Bible too much? It makes some people go crazy, doesn’t it?”
She took his Bible from him and read from the Gospel of John, “‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it to you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name; ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.’” Then she looked at him. “You’re a good boy; you want to help others. Why shouldn’t your prayers be heard? You don’t have to stop reading the Bible. I’ll know if something goes wrong with you. But I think we’d better not tell anyone about this, for now.”
He did not tell anyone for years. But a strange thing happened the next day.
Though young Edgar enjoyed reading the Bible, he did not enjoy reading his schoolbooks and so he was not a good student. His school was just a country school; his teachers were usually an uncle or an aunt; for a while, his own father taught there; many of his fellow students were relatives. Edgar seemed to be the dullard of the family. That day, he did not know a single word of his spelling assignment. The teacher, his Uncle Lucian, made him stay after school and write the words over and over. Edgar was late getting home to his chores; and when his father found out why, the man was furious. Cayce later recalled:
“In the evening, I had the same hard time in preparing my spelling lesson. I studied it and each time felt that I knew it; yet when I handed the book to my father and he gave me the words to spell, I couldn’t spell them. After wrestling with it for two or three hours, receiving many rebuffs for my stupidity, something inside me seemed to say, ‘Rely on the promise.’ I asked my father to let me sleep on my lesson just five minutes. He finally consented. I closed the book and, leaning on the back of the chair, went to sleep. At the end of five minutes, I handed my father the book. I not only knew my lesson but I could then spell any word in the book—not only spell the words but could tell on what page and what line the word would be found. From that day on, I had little trouble in school, for I would read my lesson, sleep on it a few minutes, and then be able to repeat every word of it.
“I could not explain this ability. It was a wonder to my parents, my associates and my teachers. I did not attempt to reason why this happened. Today, my life is a combination of literally thousands of such experiences. Although I understand many of the laws associated with these phenomena, my understanding is born of experience, and I leave the technical explanations to others.”
Edgar Cayce quit school at fifteen, having completed six years of education. He worked on his father’s farm for two years, then moved into town—Hopkinsville—to get a job and try to save some money for whatever his future held for him. At the time, he was thinking of becoming a missionary. In town, he worked in a stationery-bookshop for over four years. By then he had met the girl he wanted to marry, and he realized he would have to have a far better income in order to do so. He applied for a job with the Louisville wholesaler who was supplying the Hopkinsville store, and he was hired. Louisville put Cayce on an economic treadmill for two years: the more he earned, the more life cost him. At Christmas, 1899, he quit the job and went home. His father was then selling insurance on the road for a fraternal organization and suggested that Cayce join him. Cayce also agreed to work as a traveling salesman for the Louisville wholesaler.
In March 1900, Edgar Cayce was working in Elkton, a town about forty miles from home. Lately he had been suffering headaches, some of them severe, and one day while working his head began to pain so badly he thought it would split. He called on a doctor and received a sedative, which he took on returning to his hotel. Next thing he knew, he was at home in his own bed. He learned that a Hopkinsville friend had come upon him in the Elkton railroad station, wandering about in a daze, and had brought him home. Two doctors were in the room; and when Cayce tried to answer their questions, he found that he could not speak. Examining him, the doctors concluded that he had caught a bad cold from walking around Elkton without a hat or coat on a wintry day, and they said that with rest and liquids he should soon be all right.
He was all right the next day, but he still could not speak above a whisper, and the effort was painful. A week later, he was up and about and restless to get to work, but still he could not speak in his normal voice. Another week passed. Another. Cayce was examined by Dr. Manning Brown, the county throat specialist; and when the doctor could not detect any reason for the loss of voice, he asked if other specialists might try to diagnose the condition. The specialists came, one after another, weeks passing, and Edgar Cayce remained unchanged.
He came to the conclusion that his condition was incurable. As long as he did not try too often to speak in his whisper, the pain was less when he did whisper. He felt he could live with that. Unable to talk, however, he would be unable to do any selling. Of necessity, he had to look for another job. He found one as assistant to a photographer in Hopkinsville, and he learned the trade. The circumstances that led to Cayce’s cure were either a stroke of luck or an act of God.
A year passed. Dr. Brown would not give up. From time to time, he sent other specialists to the Cayce home, but they could find nothing organically wrong with Edgar. Then a vaudeville hypnotist came to town. There had already been newspaper articles out of New York, from a Dr. John F. Quackenboss, to the effect that hypnotism would one day be used to cure illnesses. Thus, when the vaudevillian came to Hopkinsville, some of Cayce’s friends went to him to ask what he could do. The man was willing to try. The experiment was conducted in Dr. Brown’s office. To everyone’s amazement, Cayce, while hypnotized, spoke in his normal voice, but upon being awakened, he could speak only in the whisper. The experiment was repeated several times, always with the same result.
Present at one of the tests was William Girao, professor of psychology at South Kentucky College. Local papers had carried items about the experiments; Girao sent the clippings to Quackenboss in New York and suggested that he examine Cayce himself. When Quackenboss arrived in Hopkinsville, he put Edgar Cayce into a deep trance and then gave him the post-hypnotic instruction that upon awaking he would speak in his normal voice. However, Cayce did not react to the order to wake up. He slept for twenty-four hours. When he finally awoke, he still spoke in a whisper. And then for a week he could hardly sleep at all.
From New York, a bewildered Quackenboss sent Girao the only explanation he could imagine for the unusual development. He said that, looking back on the experiment, he had the feeling that there was a point when he no longer had control over the hypnotized Cayce. It was as though Cayce himself had taken over. Quackenboss suggested that Cayce be hypnotized again and then be informed that he, Cayce, was in control. This way, he might remember what had happened to him to bring on his condition, and then maybe doctors would find out what therapy to apply.
The only available person in Hopkinsville with the ability to hypnotize was a bookkeeper by the name of Al Layne, and he had taught himself the feat from a correspondence course. Because of this, Cayce’s parents were reluctant to let him experiment with their son. Nevertheless, Edgar wanted to try.
“You know,” he said in his whisper, “I don’t think anybody has really hypnotized me at all. I put myself to sleep, the way I do on books. Let’s do it that way. Then we can give Dr. Quackenboss’s idea a chance—have somebody talk to me. AI Layne can do it.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, March 31, 1901, Al Layne arrived at the Cayce home. Waiting for him in the living room were Edgar Cayce and his parents. They told Layne how they wanted to conduct the experiment and, though disappointed that he would not be able to display his talent, Layne agreed to the plan. Cayce lay down on the sofa and put himself to sleep. When his breathing became slow, deep and steady, Layne leaned toward him.
“Edgar,” he said, “this is Al Layne. I want you to do what I tell you. I want you to envision your body. Take a look at it. You know you have something wrong with your throat. Tell us what it is. And speak in your regular voice.”
Cayce mumbled in his sleep, then said, clearly and in his own voice, “Yes, we can see the body.” There was a movement of his closed eyes. “In the normal state, this body is unable to speak, due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords, produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing the circulation of the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”
Taking the cue, Layne said, “The circulation to the affected parts will now increase and the condition will be removed.”
Almost immediately, a blush came upon Cayce’s face, gradually deepened, and then gradually spread to his neck and chest. His father opened his shirt to make him comfortable. For twenty minutes, the three others sat there, watching him. Except for the fierce redness of his skin, he seemed all right, deep in a peaceful sleep. Then he cleared his throat and said, “It is all right now. The condition is removed. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal and that after that the body will awaken.”
Layne said, “The circulation will return to normal. The body will then awaken.”
Gradually Cayce’s skin took on its normal color. He awoke, sat up, coughed, and then he grinned. He said, “It is all right now.”
It was his first reading. The date was March 31, 1901. That was the first reading. Edgar Cayce had been stricken with laryngitis for nearly a year.
Next day, he did his second reading—on Layne. Not a well man, Layne looked older than his thirty-five years. Curious about the body that had caused him so much discomfort, he had studied osteopathy by mail and later obtained a license to practice. During the reading, Layne was amazed by Edgar Cayce’s knowledge of anatomy. Cayce not only told Layne about ailments he knew he had but also described others that came as a surprise to him. Moreover, the therapy recommended during the reading worked.
Layne brought others to Cayce. In the small town that Hopkinsville was at the time, it was impossible to keep secret this incredible new faculty Edgar Cayce had acquired. Articles appeared in the town paper, then the county paper, then the state and national. Letters appealing for help began to arrive from all over the country. Looking back, Cayce once said:
“I was still ashamed to talk about these readings. People thought me odd and I resented for a time the little slights and slurs of my associates who took pleasure in laughing at me. It is hard to be ‘different.’ I finally selected photography as a life work and gave only my spare time and evenings to the increasing number of requests for readings. It was only when I began to come in contact with those who received help from following the suggestions given in readings that I began to realize the true nature of the work which lay before me. Indeed, I did not even decide to give my whole time to this work until results in my own family brought me face to face with facts.
“One day a man phoned me at my studio: ‘I have heard of what you, with the assistance of a certain man, have been able to do for those who are very sick. I have a little girl whose condition is said to be hopeless. Won’t you come and see what you will say about her condition?’
“I will never forget my feelings on that occasion. I journeyed to the little city where this professor lived. He met me at the train with his carriage, drove me to his home, introduced me to his wife, then asked me if I would like to see the little girl and examine her. How foolish I felt! I didn’t know whether I wanted to or not. I knew that of myself I could tell nothing. I knew I had never studied anything of the kind and didn’t know what it was all about I told him: ‘Yes, but I do not suppose it makes any difference.’ They led me into a room where the little girl was sitting on the floor rolling blocks. A nurse was attending her. She looked as well as any child I had ever seen, and I couldn’t imagine what in the world would be said regarding such a perfect looking little girl.”
As it turned out, the eight-year-old had been suffering numerous convulsions daily since the age of two, and a series of doctors had been unable to do anything for her. During the reading, Cayce reported that congestion had formed at the base of the girl’s brain following an attack of influenza at the age of two and had worsened with each convulsion. Osteopathic treatment cleared the condition and the girl began a normal life.
As gratifying as such experiences must have been for Edgar Cayce, he remained puzzled and disturbed and on a number of occasions he wanted to stop the readings. But the appeals kept coming in. At first, AI Layne served as conductor, putting the questions to Cayce. When Layne left for formal osteopathy studies, Cayce’s father took over. In 1903, Edgar Cayce married Gertrude Evans, to whom he had been engaged for six years, and eventually she became the principal conductor for the rest of his life. In those first years, the readings dealt almost entirely with the diagnosis of disease and recommendation of therapy, but occasionally a reading took an unusual turn. For example, a New Yorker who had received a copy of his reading notified Cayce that he could not locate a supply of the medicine Cayce had recommended. Cayce did another reading and was able to inform the man which drugstore in New York had the medicine. When the man replied that the store didn’t have it, Cayce did another reading and was able to describe exactly where in the shop the bottle was located. It was there; it had been there so long that the druggist had forgotten about it.
Over these first years, a pattern in Cayce’s therapeutic recommendations developed, the significance of which remained elusive. Often, as with the New Yorker, Cayce would recommend a medicine which hadn’t been produced commercially for so long that pharmacists either forgot about it or never heard of it. Other times, he would recommend the use of herbs or roots which, if their medicinal value had ever been acknowledged, had long since been abandoned as witch doctors’ brews. Also, this period was decades before the popularity of “natural” or “health” foods, but Cayce recommended them. It would seem, then, that available to Edgar Cayce during readings was a vast knowledge of medicinal chemistry by which people cured themselves long before pharmacology became a science. Thus, the possibility that other areas of knowledge might also be available to Cayce somehow eluded everybody. Cayce himself did not think of it until he was in his forties and the idea was not his own.
In 1915, Edgar Cayce went to Lexington to do a follow-up reading on a woman whose severe arthritis had diminished by therapy elicited at earlier sessions, and he was introduced to a neighboring family, the Kahns. The Kahns had a son, Leon, who was not well. Cayce did a reading on the boy. The results were so effective that, in gratitude, the Kahns decided that as a family they would give Edgar Cayce all the support they could. The eldest son, David, then fifteen, was made responsible for the project. At the time, the Kahns were in the grocery business; there wasn’t much they could do for Cayce. Cayce himself wasn’t sure what ought to be done. Next time they talked about it, Edgar Cayce knew.
David Kahn served in World War I, returning to Lexington in 1919, a captain. He also returned a zealous Edgar Cayce missionary. While he had been away, doctors refused to continue the therapy, which Cayce’s reading, had recommended for Leon Kahn, and the boy had died. David Kahn did not want that to happen again to anybody else. During the war, he had talked to many friends about Edgar Cayce. Intrigued, they now all wanted to help. He told Cayce this at their reunion meeting.
“I’m sure I can raise the money for you,” Kahn said. “What do you need?”
“A hospital,” Cayce said.
It was the first time he had thought of it, but instantly he knew perfectly well that a hospital was what he needed. Leon Kahn had not been the only person to die because doctors scoffed at the readings’ recommendations. And in many instances when the readings were carried out successfully, doctors scoffed because no scientific records had been kept of the case and so nothing could be proved. Edgar Cayce did not want to prove anything. All he wanted was a place where the readings could be executed in the most sanitary conditions, with the most modem equipment, and by qualified doctors. Scientific records would be kept, of course, and they could speak for themselves. For Cayce, the only value in such records was to put trust into the validity of the readings, not in him as a man. For himself, he wanted nothing.
David Kahn could not wait to get started. He suggested that he and Cayce make a tour of the country, using the friends he had met in the war to help arrange public demonstrations of Cayce’s faculties to raise money for the hospital. By this time, Edgar Cayce was operating his photographic studio in Selma, Alabama, and his second son, Edgar Evans Cayce, had been born. The tour, then, meant both a financial and personal loss for Cayce, taking him away from his business and, from time to time, his family. The tour took him westward across the South, then north into the Wheat Belt, then east. Though a success for Cayce himself, the trip was not sufficiently remunerative, and it became clear that another way to raise funds for the hospital would have to be found.
The way that was suggested left Edgar Cayce considerably uneasy. It was suggested that, since Edgar Cayce had located in a New York drugstore a bottle of medicine nobody knew was there, he should be able to locate in Texas oil deposits which nobody as yet knew were there. At first, Cayce balked at this. He had always refused to engage in experiments that involved profits for anyone, including himself. But when he was assured that profits from the oil venture would go to his hospital, he felt it was admissible to make an exception in this case. With Kahn and others involved, he headed for Texas. Oil was indeed located, but something always went wrong in the process of bringing it up—machinery would break, a fire would occur, a storm would wreck equipment.
Hugh Lynn Cayce, then a teenager, spent a summer with his father in Texas, conducting the readings, and he wrote his mother that he was puzzled by the frequency with which his father said during readings that the oil venture was doomed to failure unless everyone involved was “in accord” with the purpose of the project: the profits were for the hospital. Hugh Lynn knew that a profit was what was left over after all expenses were paid, and he wondered if anyone involved in the project might be planning on such huge expenses that there would be little left over for the hospital. The project never got that far; funds ran out and the effort was abandoned. Between the tour and the oil project, it was four years before Edgar Cayce and his family were again settled in Selma.
It had so happened that on the tour, Cayce had given a demonstration of readings in Dayton, Ohio, and present at some of them had been a businessman by the name of Arthur Lammers, a man with a long, profound and active interest in things philosophical, metaphysical and occult. Impressed by the Dayton readings, Lammers had an idea he wanted to put to Cayce. Because of Cayce’s immediate travels on the tour and his subsequent travels in Texas, over two years passed before Lammers was able to locate him in Selma and go to him there. Lammers’s idea was intriguing.
Lammers had observed that some of the medical recommendations during health readings turned out to be accepted medical practice in centuries long past, and now Lammers wondered if perhaps information on other areas of past centuries might also be available to Edgar Cayce during readings. For example, what about the origin of the planets? What about the evolution of man? What about the nature of souls? What about the divinity of Jesus Christ? What about life after death?
Cayce was disturbed by these questions. A Christian, he accepted the Bible’s answers for these unanswerable questions. He felt it would be unwise—even dangerous—to delve into such spiritual areas. He was confident that his psychic faculties were God-given, but who could tell whether they might become Satan-used. Anyway, Cayce doubted that his faculties were meant for such purposes. Conceding that such ideas had never occurred to him before, he was sure that the effort would not work.
Lammers pressed him to try. There was so much to be learned; and because the readings might take time, Lammers invited Cayce to do them in Dayton with all expenses paid plus an attractive per diem. Cayce didn’t care about the money. Whatever the true reason behind the Texas fiasco, Cayce concluded from it that diagnosis of illness was the limit of his powers. As for money, people for whom Cayce was doing readings by mail had developed the habit of sending him donations out of gratitude, and some of the doctors who consulted him would send him checks for professional services. Cayce’s current plans, then, were to phase himself out of photography so that he could devote himself fulltime to what he now called the “work.” Toward that end, he had hired a secretary, Gladys Davis, who was to work with him for the rest of his life. And the ultimate end remained, of course, the hospital.
And yet Cayce could not dismiss a nagging uncertainty about Lammers’s idea. If there were some past truths—some eternal truths—which through the readings could be made known and serve for the betterment of people, where would he stand in the eyes of God if he refused to let himself be used for this purpose? He put the question to Gertrude, but she was as uncertain as he was. They finally agreed however, that he should at least give it a try, depending on God to let him know through the readings whether he was doing the right thing.
One morning in 1923, Edgar Cayce opened the door of his room in a Dayton hotel to Lammers, Lammers’s male secretary Linden Shroyer, and a public stenographer. Because Lammers had witnessed readings, he knew how to conduct one. They did not know where to begin, so Lammers suggested that Cayce give him a horoscope reading. Cayce laughed; he did not believe in astrology. But he said, “I’m ready. Ask me anything you want.” And he went to sleep.
When he awoke an hour later, he found himself looking into the astonished faces of three staggered people. After they told him what he had said, he, too, was staggered. This was Edgar Cayce’s first Life reading. Over the next twenty years, he was to do thousands more. Out of them came a pattern of life that made Life far different for thousands of people, for they learned that this life was not the only life they had ever had or ever would.