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Edgar Cayce: the 'prophet' who 'slept' his way to the top
Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Dale Beyerstein
Cayce's followers never suggested an explanation for the development of his clairvoyant powers. However, his family's account of the onset is as follows. At the age of 13, an angel appeared to young Edgar Cayce in a secluded spot in the woods and asked Cayce what he wanted most. He responded that he wanted to help others, at which point the angel vanished. He was so disturbed that night that he slept poorly; consequently, the next day his performance at school was worse than usual. He was always thought to be dull in school, but this day was so much worse that Cayce's father, Leslie, was determined that evening to see him learn his spelling lessons. After an evening of futile spelling drill, at 11 P.M. Leslie suggested that they give up for the night and go to bed. Edgar asked to be allowed to take a five-minute nap and insisted that after sleeping he would know the lesson. Leslie went to the kitchen for a drink of water, and on his return Edgar was fast asleep with his head resting on his textbook. Leslie woke him up and told him to go to bed. At this point Edgar knew everything that was in the book. For the rest of his life Cayce used this method to learn from books and supposedly had near perfect retention of material gathered this way. However, Cayce never displayed this skill publicly, nor submitted himself to any controlled tests of these claims.
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For two years the clairvoyance was useful only to help Cayce pass his spelling tests. Then, in 1892, when he was 15, he was hit in the neck with a baseball in the schoolyard. After behaving strangely for the rest of the day, laughing and throwing things, he went to bed. He then demanded a poultice made of corn meal, onions, and herbs -- typical of the treatments recommended in the almanacs of the day from which most farm families treated themselves. He then settled down and was fine the next day except for claiming to remember nothing from the time he was hit with the ball until he awoke the next morning. Sugrue (1945) offers this story as evidence of Cayce's first clairvoyant diagnosis and prescription. The only other aspect of Cayce's teenage life of any interest was his claim to have dowsed for water on a few occasions, a talent he claimed to have inherited from his grandfather.
In 1900 Cayce had a bout of laryngitis that resulted in a loss of his voice for ten months -- likely hysterical in origin. He had just started a job as a traveling salesman, taking him on the road away from his fiancee Gertrude Evans, in Hopkinsville. It was only reasonable for him to quit this job and return to Hopkinsville and Gertrude. He began an apprenticeship with a local photographer. When Hart the Laugh King, a stage hypnotist, passed through town, Cayce's family asked the hypnotist to give Cayce a private consultation. He proved to be a good subject and regained his voice while "hypnotized." But when he awoke, the "post-hypnotic suggestion" did not take, and he was still speechless. In 1901 Cayce tried the town's only resident hypnotist, Al Layne, who was also the bookkeeper for his wife's millinery shop and had just completed his mail-order course in osteopathy. When Layne "hypnotized" him, Cayce took control of the situation and began a reading on himself, starting with the line that was to introduce his readings for others for the next 43 years: "Yes, we can see the body." When Cayce awoke, his voice was permanently restored. Layne was so impressed that he asked Cayce to return the favor and do a reading on him. Layne had suffered from stomach trouble for years. Cayce obliged the next day, and Layne was so impressed with Cayce's diagnosis of him and the remedies suggested that he proposed that they go into partnership -- Cayce to provide the diagnosis and Layne the interpretation of Cayce's suggested remedies. Thus began the year-long partnership mentioned earlier, though Cayce decided to move to nearby Bowling Green to take a job in a bookstore. Sugrue (1945) reports that Cayce continued to have doubts about whether God approved of him using his powers to cure people this way, and maintains that this was the explanation for Cayce alternating over the next few years between his careers as a photographer and as a healer. Another possibility is that there was not enough money in readings alone to make ends meet for his growing family.
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