Edgar Cayce: the 'prophet' who 'slept' his way to the top

Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Dale Beyerstein

Known as "The Sleeping Prophet" after a biography of him by that title became popular (Stern 1967), Edgar Caye (1866-1945) for 42 for 42 years gave "medical readings" while in a trance that diagnosed people's supposed illnesses, and for 19 years gave "life readings" that traced followers' past lives and made predictions for their futures. Some of these readings also predicted world events.

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During most of his career, Cayce's (pronounced KAYsee) often rambling discourses were recorded by a stenographer. Although Cayce took directions from others in the room who "controlled" the reading and responded to questions and suggestions, he claimed that he never remembered anything from his trances upon awakening. However, Stern (1967) maintains that the common belief that Cayce was psychic only in this trance state is false. He claims that Cayce, when awake, constantly saw auras surrounding people and could clairvoyantly read through the backs of playing cards, although these supposed abilities were never tested under scientifically controlled conditions.

Cayce was aware of the "Poughkeepsie Seer," Andrew Jackson Davis of Poughkeepsie, New York, and Cayce's sessions resembled those of that mid-nineteenth-century "wonder" more and more as Cayce got older. Cayce's purported paranormal powers were confined to the clairvoyance involved in his diagnoses of individuals' health conditions. Neither he nor his followers ever claimed that he could heal people paranormally; rather, cures were supposedly the result of the treatments prescribed by Cayce during his readings. Cayce's treatments and medications were typical of those prescribed by osteopaths, homeopaths, and sometimes, chiropractors. For the first nine years of Cayce's career, there was someone in attendance at every one of Cayce's readings who knew medical, or at least fringe medical, terminology. Throughout the rest of his career, there were various people with medical knowledge supervising his trances. Though it is true that Cayce was not formally trained in any of these professions, he had ample help mastering the jargon.

For the first year that Cayce gave readings, 1902 to 1903, his trances were supervised by Al Layne, an osteopath with a mail-order degree who also practiced hypnotism. In 1903 Layne was "asked" by the medical association in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where he and Cayce then lived, to cease his osteopathy practice. Layne then moved to Franklin, Kentucky, to begin studies at the Southern School of Osteopathy. Because of the distance, Cayce and Layne gradually lost touch.

Layne's role as director of Cayce's trances was taken over for three years by a medical doctor, John Blackburn. However, their close relationship soured in 1906 after Blackburn persuaded Cayce to give a public reading at the Bowling Green E.Q.B. Literary Club. This event was attended by several doctors and ended up being the closest thing to a controlled experiment ever performed on Cayce. When Cayce went into his trance, the doctors tested Cayce's responsiveness to external stimuli. One poked him with a hatpin while another cut his left forefinger with a penknife. Cayce "woke up" and cited this occasion for the remaining 39 years of his life as his reason for never allowing himself to be tested under controlled conditions by medical doctors or scientists. There is actually some merit in Cayce's anger: The doctors would have done better by concentrating on the veracity of Cayce's diagnoses and treatments, rather than determining whether he was in a trance or merely faking it. After Blackburn, Cayce found a homeopath, Wesley Ketchum, who arranged a three-way partnership between himself, Cayce, and the owner of a hotel in Hopkinsville, Albert Noe. This partnership lasted until 1911, when Cayce walked out over a dispute with Ketchum over Ketchum's acceptance of a fee for a reading that Cayce had not yet given.

The evidence for Cayce's abilities is thought by many to be impressive simply because of its sheer volume. The foundation set up to study and disseminate Cayce's work, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), in Virginia Beach, Virginia, boasts 30,000 transcripts of readings recorded by a stenographer at the time the readings were made. These make up almost all the readings Cayce gave in his long career. However, they generally are records only of Cayce's words; not the context of the trance. Thus, these documents are worthless by themselves. First, they do not record what information Cayce could discern in those readings by simple observation of the subject who was present or what Cayce was told by those conducting the session. Much information was available from his followers' letters appealing for help or from other sources. (Sometimes though, the questions posed to Cayce reveal how he could make use of information given to him in the way of a cold reading.) Second, the transcripts tell only what Cayce said, with no indication of what he said as being true. For that analysis we would need independent documents reporting on the illnesses, treatments, and outcomes, against which we could verify Cayce's claims. The A.R.E. does have some follow-up letters from "patients" and even fewer letters from medical practitioners (either from the fringe or the orthodox varieties) that could fulfill this purpose. However, the A.R.E. has never claimed to have finished its cataloguing of these documents, so we do not know how many of the readings have supporting documents. The examples made available by the A.R.E. consist of testimonials and bread-and-butter letters thanking Cayce for his efforts. These amount to anecdotes that are now unverifiable. As evidence of Cayce's ability to cure, they are also inherently unreliable for the following reasons:

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Edgar Cayce: the 'prophet' who 'slept' his way to the top

Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Dale Beyerstein

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