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Edgar Cayce: the 'prophet' who 'slept' his way to the top
Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Dale Beyerstein
Cayce was a devout Christian, vowing when he was 10 years old to read the Bible once for each year of his life. By the time he was 12 years old he claimed to have read it 12 times, despite the evidence of his family that he was dull and an impossible speller at this age, until his psychic ability developed. He continued thereafter to read the book annually until his death. His psychic readings for the first 21 years were full of biblical phrases and metaphors, with no hint of anything outside the views of the Christian Church, an offshoot of Presbyterianism in the southern United States. In 1923, after the collapse of his Texas on well venture (he predicted oil, but none materialized), Cayce gave a reading for Arthur Lammers, a wealthy Dayton printer who was a believer in Nostradamus, reincarnation, astrology, and other occult notions. Cayce's readings confirmed Lammers's beliefs, and from that time on Cayce's readings referred to these notions, as well as Atlantis, and what he and Lammers took to be gnostic beliefs. Cayce attempted to reconcile these notions with Christianity by adopting claims of British Israelism. This is a group that claims the British are descendants of a lost tribe of Israel who worked on the Egyptian pyramids, where they picked up much occult knowledge that was later forgotten by mainstream Christianity.
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There is a myth surrounding Cayce that he was illiterate, uneducated, and incapable of learning through normal channels about the cures he prescribed for individuals during his "trance" states. The source of this myth was an article in The New York Times Magazine published Sunday, October 9, 1910, with the headline "Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized: Strange Power Shown by Edgar Cayce Puzzles Physicians." The notion that he had no knowledge of medical facts during his awake states is not only incompatible with the family's belief that he obtained knowledge by literally "sleeping on it" and then had perfect retention of those facts while in the awake state, it is also incompatible with other facts of Cayce's life. Cayce attended school until 16 and worked in several bookstores before becoming a photographer. His first job in a bookstore was in one that supplied the books for two high schools, a girls college, and South Kentucky College. Many of the texts for the colleges that passed through his hands contained information that would appear in his readings. His diagnoses and remedies were common to almanacs and home remedy books that were in every farmhouse in the southern United States at the time, and therefore, readily available to Cayce in the various bookstores he worked in, if not in his own home. And as previously mentioned, throughout his career his trances were managed by M.D.s, homeopaths, and osteopaths. He also discussed cases with chiropractors.
Much is made of Cayce restoring the sight of his son Hugh Lynn Cayce in 1914, after the 8-year-old boy had accidentally ignited some photographic flash powder in his father's studio. Hugh Lynn was in the care of orthodox medicine for this injury, but Sugrue (1945) reports that the physicians had given up hope that the child would recover his sight. Cayce's "reading" for his son called for tannic acid to be applied to the injury, and against the doctors, advice, this was done. The Implication was that it was Cayce's prescription from his "reading" that restored the child's sight. Also, Sugrue maintains that Cayce was the one responsible for his wife Gertrude's recovery from tuberculosis, rather than the doctors who also treated her. However, this is questionable: Sugrue did not even meet Cayce until 14 years after these two recoveries; there was no independent corroboration from the doctors concerned; and 16 more years elapsed until the first edition of Sugrue's book -- more than enough time for these stories to grow with the retelling.
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