Cayce-Universe.com

The Cayce Universe
by Sidney & Nancy Kirkpatrick

Why Edgar Cayce?

(From the introduction to True Tales from the Cayce Archives, Lives Touched and Lessons Learned from the Sleeping Prophet (A.R.E. Press) by Sidney and Nancy Kirkpatrick)

Like many journalists, I [Sidney] once arrogantly believed that psychic phenomena was a subject unworthy of serious study, and that anyone who put their faith in a trance medium was either fooling themselves or the unwitting victim of fraud. Then along came Nancy Webster, who would become my writing partner and wife. "Edgar Cayce is going to be the subject of your next book," Nancy prophetically declared. Not wishing to be rude or condescending, I politely declined further discussion. But Nancy, a dedicated student of Cayce's work since she had been in high school, was unrelenting. Books and articles about the so-called "sleeping prophet" of Virginia Beach appeared in my mail box with such regularity that, to finally put the matter to rest, I read one.

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945)

To say that the Cayce story challenged my imagination is an understatement. A backwoods Kentucky farm boy with an eighth grade education, he allegedly had the ability to enter into a deep hypnotic trance from which he could diagnose illness, witness events in the distant past, preview the future, and converse with angels.No subject was off limits, regardless of how simple or complex the question, whether it was help finding a lost pocket watch, how to perform a surgical procedure, or what to expect in the hereafter. Cayce would lay down on a couch, fold his hands over this stomach, seemingly drift off to sleep, and miraculously answer any question put to him. Rarely, if ever, was he proven wrong.

In the course of his forty-one year career, Cayce reportedly saved hundreds of people from intractable diseases and crippling injuries. A hospital dedicated to his healing arts was built in Virginia Beach, where patients received his trance readings, and specialty technology, years ahead of its time, was used to treat them. He guided the business interests of Detroit auto parts manufacturers and helped New York stock brokers and Texas oilmen become millionaires. He identified the location of buried treasure, solved a murder, and dictated trance-induced Hollywood screenplays. Yet Cayce and his family led lives of constant struggle and hardship, moving from home to home, often under threat of being persecuted for fortunetelling or practicing medicine without a license. He didn't profit from giving trance counsel, or promote himself, and for much of his life, he earned his livelihood as a portrait photographer as well as a much admired husband, father, and church deacon.

Cayce's story seemed altogether too incredible to be true. This was why, I suspected, fifty years had elapsed since a comprehensive biography of Cayce had been written. No serious writer or journalist would devote time to making a rigorous examination of the facts because they wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. Dig deeper and Cayce's story was sure to unravel. Or so I supposed.

Always a step ahead of me, Nancy would send me transcripts of Cayce's trance readings. Accompanying them were physician's reports and convincing first-person testimony of how his recommended health treatments—frequently dismissed in his lifetime as the fanciful products of his imagination—had later become fully accepted by the mainstream medical community. Trance discourses he gave on such subjects as foods for health and healing, hydrotherapy, massage, and the intimate connection between psychological and physical health would earn Cayce distinction as the undisputed father of today's holistic health movement. Information he gave on world history, physics, electrical engineering, and earth sciences also proved uncannily accurate. And though he died decades before wide-spread popular interest in paranormal phenomenon, Cayce's trance readings on subjects such as remote viewing, life after death, reincarnation, the secrets of the Sphinx, and the lost continent of Atlantis, would set the standard by which nearly all metaphysical information has subsequently been judged. He was to the world of psychics and mediums what Babe Ruth was to baseball.

Most compelling, Cayce didn't speak in vague, ambiguous terms that were open for interpretation, but used precise medical and scientific terminology well beyond his education and training. Further, he didn't perform these superhuman feats a few hundred times in the course of his career. He gave well over sixteen thousand trance readings, each one different, and some lasting thirty minutes to an hour. On many occasions professors from Ivy League universities, notable church leaders, bank presidents, historians, physicians, inventors and scientists attended his trance session. Master magician Harry Houdini, having dedicated himself to exposing the fraudulent practices of hundreds of occult mediums and spiritualists, failed to debunk or explain the Cayce phenomenon, as did Hugo Münsterberg, of Harvard Medical School. 

Even this, however, was not what made the Cayce material most relevant. As his trance readings make clear, their ultimate purpose was not simply to provide diagnostic insights to aid physicians, bring about miraculous cures, locate lost treasure, or to excite the intellect. They were provided to help individuals to understand and accept the truth of the multi-dimensional world in which we live. Cayce had provided incontrovertible evidence for the existence of a consciousness beyond our five senses. His work was an open door into another dimension through which we can more fully understand ourselves and our place in the universe.

The question that I was soon asking myself was not whether Cayce did what he was alleged to have done—the evidence was overwhelming—but how he did it. Thus began our study of Edgar Cayce, and along with it, a partnership was formed between myself, a nonbeliever, and Nancy, whose faith in Cayce never faltered. Together we would research Cayce's life and work as it had never been conducted before, producing his definitive biography, Edgar Cayce, An American Prophet, authoring numerous articles, contributing to movie and television projects, and most important, endeavoring to apply his trance guidance into our everyday lives and those of our four children.

A trip to Virginia Beach, Virginia, was our starting point. Here, at the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) are housed the Edgar Cayce archives, which consist of an estimated half-million pages of trance readings, correspondence, family papers, and photographs. As Cayce primarily gave readings for particular individuals who requested his help, and follow-up biographical research had been conducted to determine the effectiveness of his advice, we had a massive collection of additional reference material which we would use to track down the people who received the readings and judge the truth for ourselves. The vast majority of names of these individuals meant little or nothing to us at the onset of our research, for they led regular lives as farmers, housewives, building contractors, musicians, students and nurses—even an Alabama tombstone cutter. Children and adults alike, and for nearly any profession one can name, came to Cayce for advice.

However, among these individuals were names that we instantly recognized. Composer George Gershwin and Hollywood film pioneer Jessie Lasky had readings, as we suspect, had inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, electrical engineers at RCA and NBC, and the president and founder of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Readings were conducted for the mother of Ernest Hemingway, for the husband of aviator Amelia Earhart, and though shrouded in secrecy, there is evidence of readings for President Woodrow Wilson. This aspect of Cayce's work had not heretofore been called attention to because Cayce had never promoted himself. He didn't trade on the names of the rich and famous who consulted with him for the same reason he didn't charge a fee for giving readings. He believed that his gift was from God and not to be used for selfish or self-serving purposes, but for the brotherhood of man, what the readings say is our collective purpose or soul's destiny.

In Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where Cayce lived and worked for the first half of his career, Nancy and I camped at the edge of farmer's field, walked the woods where Cayce played as a youth, and visited the tobacco barn where he had first begun communicating with the spirit world. In Selma, Alabama, we visited the First Christian Church, in whose archive we read the minutes once kept by its church secretary, Edgar Cayce. In Cleburne, Texas, we met the son of a newspaper reporter who worked with Cayce to develop the Desdemona oil-fields, one of the largest petroleum and natural gas deposits ever found. In Dayton, Ohio, we interviewed a man whose employer's dream was to build the hospital dedicated to Cayce's healing arts. Many others who knew Cayce personally or received readings came forward with stories that had previously gone unrecorded. As we would discover, their enthusiasm for Cayce went beyond the trance counsel he provided. They enjoyed his company—whether he was teaching Bible study, working alongside them in the photo studio, or joining him at his favorite fishing hole. A humble, kind, and affectionate man, he preferred the company of children, friends, and co-workers over and above his many rich and famous acquaintances. He touched their lives, and they touched his.

Herein lies the theme of this book. Edgar Cayce could not do what he did alone. Deep in a hypnotic trance, he had no conscious memory of anything that was said. He needed someone—more often than not his wife Gertrude—to guide him into trance and put questions to him. He also needed someone to record and transcribe what he said, a task which would ultimately fall to his devoted secretary, Gladys Davis. He needed plenty of others—physicians, nurses, physical therapists, scientists, engineers and Biblical scholars, even an Alabama tombstone cutter, to help recipients of the readings make the most of the advice that was provided. Most important, he needed someone who genuinely wanted his help. The more deeply felt and true the desire for that help, the longer, more detailed and often more profound was the information that came through. He needed a team, just as the trance readings tell us that all of us need a team or partners with whom, and by design, we are to share life's experience.

Now, more than two decades after first entering the Cayce vault in Virginia Beach, it is not just Edgar that keeps us coming back for further research and study, but the many people whose lives gave shape and meaning to his trance readings. Understanding their challenges, triumphs, failures and desires is to understand the higher purpose of our own life's journey. This is what is meant by "Cayce's work." It's not his work, but our work.

The Open Door

(From the introduction to Edgar Cayce, An American Prophet, (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group) by Sidney and Nancy Kirkpatrick)

Nine years after the turn of the twentieth century, a photographer named Edgar Cayce stepped off a Pullman onto a crowded passenger platform in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Edgar might normally have paused to greet acquaintances at the station or warm himself beside the coal stove in the ticket office, but he had more pressing business on that cold February night. He pulled up the collar on his thin cotton jacket and ventured into the downpour to meet a waiting carriage.

The driver, Lynn Evans, quickly ushered Edgar inside his cab. As chief ticket agent and superintendent at the Hopkinsville depot, Lynn was the nat­ural choice to be on the lookout for his brother-in-law's arrival on the north­bound local from Guthrie, Kentucky. Knowing the urgency of Cayce's visit, Lynn likely reached for the horse's reins the moment the tall, lanky pho­tographer emerged from the cloud of steam billowing out from under the eighty-two-ton locomotive.

Framed in the yellow halo of light from the overhead oil lamps on East Ninth Street, Edgar looked too young to be a church deacon or the owner of one of Kentucky's most respected photography studios. His shy, pensive smile and clean-shaven face gave him the youthful appearance of a college sopho­more coming home for the holidays. His tousled brown hair was cut short, accentuating his high forehead, deep-set blue-gray eyes, and receding chin. His large feet and hands seemed better suited to an awkward boy on the verge of manhood than a thirty-two-year-old husband and father.

A closer look at Cayce revealed the truth of his age and occupation. Hav­ing spent much of the last decade in a darkroom, his complexion was pale and his fingers were stained brown from the chemicals he handled routinely in the developing baths. The acrid odor of those chemicals still clung to his clothes as Edgar knocked the mud from his high-top leather shoes and climbed into the carriage for the mile trip through Hopkinsville to a house known to Edgar and Lynn as "The Hill."

The journey was familiar territory for both men. Edgar had traveled it many times on foot and by bicycle during his courtship with Lynn's sister, Gertrude, and though he now had the luxury of taking a horse and car­riage, Cayce knew the unpaved streets of the city and its squat two- and three-story redbrick buildings as intimately as he knew the darkroom in his photographic studio in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Behind the teardrop spire on the train station was the downtown business district where Edgar had once clerked at the Hopper Brothers Bookstore. To the east was the block-long tobacco planters' warehouse, which had been built by his great-uncle George, and which housed the crop that gave Hop­kinsville and greater Christian County the distinction of being the largest producer of pipe and chewing tobacco in the nation. Beyond the clock tower on the fire station shone the lights of the Hotel Latham, where he had pho­tographed Theodore Roosevelt during his campaign for president.

Lynn Evans drove the carriage east on the Russellville Road, passing the ivy-covered boys' dormitory at South Kentucky College on Belmont Hill. The grand Victorian homes lining the road were painted in rich pastels and were festooned with scalloped shingles, copper weather vanes, flag poles, and white picket fences. The farther they went from the center of town, the less ornate the homes became. The asphalt soon gave way to an unpaved road where the massive wrought-iron gates of the Hopkinsville mental asylum, Christian County's largest building, dominated the bleak landscape. The carriage rattled past a few lonely stands of ash and elder trees, shorn of leaves, and the dirt road became two muddy lanes running between the rolling brown hills and the still bare tobacco fields that were the primary source of Hopkinsville's wealth.

The house called The Hill sat on a high promontory a few hundred feet within the city limits. It was a single-story, four-bedroom home of classic an­tebellum design, painted gun-metal gray and dominated by four white Doric columns. The front of the house had a large open veranda shaded by oak and maple trees. At the rear of the property, separated from the main house by a carriage walk and rose garden, were the kitchen, smokehouse, chicken coop, barn, and dog run. The many outbuildings, like the home itself, had been designed and constructed by Dr. Samuel Salter, Lynn and Gertrude's maternal grandfather, a respected civil engineer, an unlicensed physician, and one of the county's leading building contractors.

It had been the late Salter's dream that The Hill would always be a safe haven for his family and their progeny, and he had seen to it that the house, its adjoining orchard, and ten acres of farmland were free of debt before his death. He had assembled an extensive library of technical and reference books, kept a full store of medical supplies in a large cedar chest in the din­ing room, and stored enough food in the root cellar and smokehouse to feed a family of eight for an entire year. It wasn't enough, however, that his fam­ily be materially independent. In the spirit of Franklin and Jefferson, he wanted all five of his children—three daughters and two sons—to become free thinkers. He sent them all to college, where they studied Plato and Shakespeare, and urged them to read newspapers, attend rallies, and engage in intellectual discussion. Their opinion counted, no matter what political or social cause they chose to support.

To Edgar Cayce, who had been born in a tiny frame cottage on a remote Christian County farm, who had ended his formal education at the age of sixteen in a single-room schoolhouse, and whose mother and sisters didn't dare to express an opinion of their own, The Hill held an attraction that went beyond his love for Gertrude and his affection for Lynn Evans. The Hill was an intellectual hothouse that both stimulated and challenged his deeply felt notions of religion and spirituality. At The Hill, Edgar didn't feel the need to confine his creative interests to the darkroom or conform to rules preached by the church elders. He could freely explore a part of himself that he had kept hidden from his pastor and from his clients at the photo studio. At The Hill, he was free, as Lynn liked to say, "to experiment."

As the carriage approached the main entrance, Edgar felt the familiar sense of security that accompanied all of his trips to The Hill. Lynn brought the horse to a halt, and as he tended to the carriage, Edgar walked quickly up the muddy path to the veranda where he was greeted by Hugh Evans, Lynn's older brother. The two briefly exchanged pleasantries before enter­ing the parlor, where the rest of the family was gathered around the fire­place. Lynn's mother, Elizabeth, was there, along with their aunt Kate and her son Hiram, and their aunt Carrie and her husband, Dr. Thomas House. Everyone's attention was focused on Carrie and Thomas's infant son, Thomas House Jr., who lay on a small, white, embroidered pillow in his mother's lap.

The infant had been suffering convulsions since his premature birth three months earlier. The convulsions had become so frequent that they now occurred every twenty minutes, leaving the helpless child too weak to nurse from his mother's bosom or to wrap his tiny hands around her fingers. Tommy House was on the verge of death from malnutrition and lack of sleep, a diagnosis confirmed by the child's father, a doctor, and by the fam­ily's two personal physicians, Dr. Jackson, a general practitioner in Hopkinsville, and Dr. Haggard, a pediatric specialist from Nashville who had been attending the child since birth. Although the three doctors disagreed about what treatment they should provide, all agreed that Thomas House Jr. had little or no chance of living through the night.

They now turned to Edgar Cayce, a photographer with an eighth-grade education and no medical training, to save little Tommy's life. Carrie wasn't sure Edgar could help her son—no more than Edgar himself was—but she wanted him to try. In previous "experiments," Cayce had demonstrated a re­markable ability to put himself into a hypnotic trance and obtain medical and other information beyond the grasp of ordinary people.

Even as a child, Edgar only had to close his eyes to locate a lost ring or pocket watch. He could read a deck of playing cards that were face down on a table or recite the contents of a closed book or sealed envelope. By merely thinking about someone he could wake the person up from a deep sleep, in­duce him or her to make a telephone call or write a letter, or in the case of young children, hold them in a particular pose long enough to have their por­traits taken. He had solved a murder, found missing persons, diagnosed ill­ness and disease, and recommended cures. He didn't use a crystal ball, playing cards, or a Ouija board. Nor did he belong to a temple or arcane spir­itual fraternity. He needed only to close his eyes, as if putting himself to sleep, and after a short period of quiet and meditation, he was able to help any person who asked for it. The greater the person's need, and the more sin­cere their motivation, the more astonishing were the results.

The mere arrival of Cayce at The Hill was enough to provoke Dr. Hag­gard to pack his bags and leave. Like many doctors in the area, he had heard accounts of Cayce's alleged powers and wanted no part of his "trickery." Dr. Jackson shared his colleague's skepticism, but as the family's longtime physi­cian, he had seen Cayce do things that he could not readily explain. Dr. House was also skeptical, but he also knew Cayce too intimately to believe that trickery was involved. The Cayces were simple tobacco farmers from the rural hamlet of Beverly, and Edgar was the least educated and most unas­suming of the lot. House had reluctantly agreed to call Edgar to The Hill only because House's headstrong wife, Carrie, had insisted he be consulted.

Doctors House and Jackson accompanied Edgar from the parlor into the master bedroom across the hall. Inside, Edgar took off his jacket and shoes, removed his tie and collar, and laid himself down on the embroidered linen bedspread covering the large oak bed. He pulled a down comforter over his stocking feet, adjusted himself on his back, and then, feet together, hands across his chest, he lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling.

More than a minute passed. In a silence broken only by the rain pound­ing on the roof and the weak cries of the dying child in the next room, Edgar's breathing deepened and his eyes closed. "You have before you the body of Thomas House Jr. of Hopkinsville, Kentucky," Dr. House said. "Di­agnose his illness and recommend a cure."

By all appearances, Edgar was fast asleep—his arms crossed, legs straight, eyes closed, breathing slowly—but Dr. House knew better. He had once seen the young photographer go into a trance so deep that fellow physicians thought he was in a coma. When one of House's colleagues had jabbed the blade of a knife under one of Cayce's fingernails and another had stuck a hy­podermic needle into his foot, he had not even flinched. And yet, the "sleep­ing" Cayce could answer questions as if he were wide awake.

Cayce began to speak in his normal voice: a deep, rich baritone with a dis­tinctly southern accent. At first his words were garbled, almost a hum, and then, like a phonograph needle that has found the groove on a record, his voice cleared and his words became well-modulated and easy to understand. "Yes, we have the body and mind of Thomas House Jr. here," he said.

Cayce proceeded to report the infant's temperature, blood pressure, and other physical and anatomical details of his body. He described the child's condition in such a cool, calm, and detached manner that an observer would have been left with the impression that he was a physician describing to fel­low colleagues an examination he was in the process of conducting. In this case, however, the physician had his eyes closed and his patient was cradled in his mother's arms in the next room. Cayce appeared to have the ability to see right into his patient's body, to examine each organ, blood vessel, and artery with microscopic precision.

Doctors House and Jackson listened intently as Cayce described an epilep­tic condition that had caused severe infantile spasms, nausea, and vomit­ing—evidently the outcome of the child's premature birth—which in turn had been the result of his mother's poor physical condition during the early months of her pregnancy. Cayce prescribed a measured dose of belladonna, administered orally, to be followed by wrapping the infant in a steaming hot poultice made from the bark of a peach tree. Cayce ended the trance session himself when he stated, "We are through for the present."

House instructed the "sleeping" Cayce to regain consciousness. Cayce dutifully followed instructions and awoke, only to find himself alone in the bedroom. In the two or three minutes it took him to open his eyes and stretch his arms, the two doctors, deep in discussion and agitated by what he had said, left the room and returned to the parlor.

As unbelievable as the source of the information was, House and Jackson both agreed that the diagnosis sounded perfectly reasonable. It was the rec­ommended cure that upset them, for the sleeping Cayce had prescribed an unusually high dose of a toxic form of deadly nightshade. Even if the peach-tree poultice could somehow leach the poison out of the infant's system, administering such a large dose of belladonna to a child as small and weak as Thomas House Jr. was tantamount to murder. Jackson expressed his senti­ments to his colleague and the child's mother in no uncertain terms: "You'll kill little Tommy for sure," he said.

Tommy's father had no choice but to agree. Although homeopathic bel­ladonna was sometimes used to treat lung and kidney ailments, pure bel­ladonna, in the form Cayce recommended, was used only in topical ointments and was certainly not something to spoon into the mouth of a three-month-old child.

Edgar joined the two doctors in the parlor but couldn't contribute to the discussion taking place. He had never been able to remember anything he had said or heard in a trance state and had little more than a rudimentary knowledge of medicine in his waking state. Even so, he grew more and more concerned as he listened to the doctors' ensuing debate. Until now, his sessions had been an experiment—a way of seeing if his abilities could help the people who came to him. He now had to face the grim reality that some­thing he had said in a trance might result in the death of a family member.

It was the child's mother who made the decision to administer the drug. Having seen Cayce work miracles in his sleep, she believed that he was touched by the Divine, that a heavenly spirit spoke through him when he was in a trance. In previous experiments, she herself had been advised not to undergo an abdominal surgery recommended by her doctors, which in­deed turned out to be unnecessary. Cayce had also predicted that she would become pregnant, something that her husband and two specialists had said was physically impossible. He also foretold the date of birth and said she would deliver a boy. And the spiritual message accompanying this information—that God's love and forgiveness must be foremost in her heart—had inspired her to minister to the patients at the Hopkinsville asylum. Now, she believed, God's mercy, love, and compassion were reaching out to her. If Edgar Cayce said that she had to poison her son in order to save his life, then that was what she was going to do.

Dr. House could not make the same leap of faith. As a highly respected general practitioner with aspirations to become the county health commis­sioner, everything he had seen and heard in the bedroom ran contrary to his training, experience, and common sense. Although he was aware of the ex­periments at The Hill, he hadn't condoned them nor given them much cre­dence. He had permitted his wife to participate because she derived pleasure and comfort from them. He had looked upon Edgar's activities as entertain­ment, a mere parlor game. But what he had just seen and heard in the bed­room a few moments earlier terrified him. Cayce hadn't spoken in terms that were open for interpretation. Without physically examining Tommy, Cayce had recited the child's blood pressure and temperature, figures that House knew to be correct because he and Jackson had taken them a few minutes be­fore Edgar's arrival at The Hill. Cayce had also described body organs with the expertise of a skilled surgeon conducting an autopsy. House didn't dare let himself speculate why Cayce had used the plural form "we" when con­ducting his trance examination, or why he apparently needed to contact lit­tle Thomas's "mind" as well as his "body" before the examination could proceed.

At his wife's insistence, and despite his very great reservations, House ul­timately agreed to prepare the belladonna. He justified the decision by say­ing that his son would surely die anyway if nothing else were done. He and Dr. Jackson might be able to prolong the infant's life by a few hours, but they were powerless to keep him alive through the night. At the very worst, giv­ing little Tommy belladonna would put the child out of his misery.

Edgar and Lynn Evans went outside to collect the ingredients for the poultice that had been recommended in the treatment. By the light of an oil lamp, Edgar climbed a peach tree in the orchard behind the barn. Using a penknife, he skillfully cut the bark from around the youngest shoots he could reach, then handed them down to Lynn Evans. They took the bark to the kitchen at the rear of the house where Aunt Kate had put a kettle on the stove to boil.

Aunt Kate prepared the hot poultice and then carried it into the parlor where Dr. House had already measured out the belladonna. He dissolved the white powder into a spoonful of water, and Carrie forced her son to swallow it. Edgar didn't join the others in the parlor to see what would happen, be­cause, as he later said, he "couldn't stand the thought of seeing Tommy House die in his mother's arms."

Medical records do not exist to describe the child's physiological reaction to the belladonna, or to the steaming hot towels dipped in peach-tree solu­tion in which the naked child was immediately wrapped. All that is known is that the crying stopped as soon as the mother spooned the poison into her child's mouth and that he fell into his first deep and uninterrupted sleep since birth. Thomas House Jr. awoke hours later, drenched in sweat, cheeks pink, and breathing steadily. He was never to have a convulsion again.

No one at The Hill that night knew who or what had intervened to save the child's life. They knew only that their lives, like that of little Tommy House, had been irrevocably changed. There was no turning back. The tears in their eyes and the pounding in their hearts told them that what they had experienced could neither be ignored nor denied. Edgar Cayce had saved the child's life.

Dr. House had witnessed something that would make it impossible for him to return to the medical profession as he knew it. Twenty years later, he would close his practice and dedicate the remainder of his career to operat­ing a hospital devoted to Edgar Cayce and his healing arts in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Carrie House would become the Cayce Hospital's supervising nurse and an outspoken proponent of the Divine "message" that she believed was being communicated through the man to whom the hospital was dedicated. Thomas House Jr. would grow up and spend his adult life designing and building innovative medical technology based on Cayce's trance readings, and, at great personal expense, would frequently drive hundreds of miles to deliver readings to patients unable to come to Virginia Beach.

Edgar Cayce also had undergone a change: he had once again proven to himself that good might come from his special talents. He had taken one of his first apprehensive and faltering steps away from the refuge of his dark­room and closer to the moment he would, as he later said, "step out into the light" and turn himself over to what became known simply as "Cayce's work," or "the work." Foremost among his many challenges would be over­coming the fear and trepidation he experienced every time he went into a trance: never knowing what might happen when he closed his eyes, what he might say while he was "under," and whether or not he would be able to open his eyes when the session ended.

In the years ahead, the work became such an integral part of Edgar Cayce's life that it was impossible to separate the man from his trance-induced communications. There were times when the readings threatened to tear his family apart, and times when they were all that held it together. Edgar Cayce would be catapulted to national prominence on the front page of the New York Times and then vilified by the Chicago Examiner. He would be championed as a savior and reviled as an agent of the Devil.

But he would continue giving readings, twice a day, nearly every day, on topics as diverse as organ transplants, cures for breast cancer and treatments for arthritis to the design of the universe and the purpose of man's existence on earth. No sub­ject was off limits. He provided trance commentary on Jesus and His disci­ples, the role of women in the founding of Christianity, and the secret of the sphinx. He offered insights into how to improve relations between men and women, the spiritual role that parents play in choosing the child that will be born to them, and the possible causes of homosexuality. During his forty-three-year career, which ended on September 17, 1944—three months be­fore his death—Edgar Cayce gave 14,145 fully documented readings for 5,744 people. Transcripts of these readings—which sometimes run as long as twenty single-spaced typed pages—and the approximately 170,000 pages of correspondence, diaries, medical reports, and notes documenting the work now comprise what is the most unusual and voluminous archive that has ever existed on a practicing psychic.

The only consolation Edgar would have in his long and frequently per­ilous journey out of the darkroom was knowing that he had the unqualified love and support of those closest to him. Despite Gertrude's worry that her husband was slowly going insane and might, one day, have to be put into the Hopkinsville asylum, she devoted her life to conducting his trance sessions and battling the ever-present financiers and speculators who sought to ex­ploit him. Accompanying Edgar on his journey was a young woman from Al­abama named Gladys Davis, a stenographer and secretary who became an indispensable part of the work by making verbatim transcripts of every­thing Cayce said while in trance, and whose appreciation and love for the "messenger" as well as his "message" raised the level of Edgar's trance readings to that of an art form.

Edgar Cayce's partners through the years included physicians, stockbrokers, inventors, soldiers, film producers, and Texas oilmen. These men would help build the Cayce Hospital in Virginia Beach and establish the first and only university whose faculty underwent psychic scrutiny before being hired. Despite the fact that these partnerships sometimes ended in costly and humiliating lawsuits, they also brought Cayce many hundreds of grateful recipients of his trance counsel. As his son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, once said, "Edgar was like an open door into another dimension. People were attracted to the light."

Master magician Harry Houdini, having dedicated himself to exposing the fraudulent practices of hundreds of occult mediums and spiritualists, failed to debunk or explain the Cayce phenomenon, and neither did police and FBI agents who launched an investigation into how he was able to accomplish the seemingly impossible. That Cayce didn't charge admission to witness his trance sessions, that he didn't conjure ectoplasm or summon phantom spirits in a darkened room, presented unique and entirely unfamiliar challenges. That he built no church, had no disciples, and avoided the limelight confounded and confused them. As the novelist and psychic re­searcher Arthur Conan Doyle said of Cayce: "He was in a class all his own."

From hundreds of pages of documents and correspondence that have never before been made public there is evidence that such scientific luminaries as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were given trance readings by Cayce, as were engineers at RCA, IBM, Delco, and the president and founder of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The inventor Mitchell Hastings credited Cayce with helping him to develop FM radio. NBC founder David Sarnoff and his family had secret readings. Innovative electronic technologies designed by Cayce in trance are now used in almost every large hospi­tal and airport in the world.

Edgar Cayce gave readings for Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Gloria Swanson, and the concerned mother of Ernest Hemingway, who consulted Cayce about her son's writing career. Marilyn Monroe practiced beauty aids recommended by Cayce in trance. Business tycoon Nelson Rockefeller and labor organizer George Meany availed themselves of Cayce's medical advice. High-ranking foreign diplomats and church leaders consulted Cayce, as did government agents and politicians whose trance readings were conducted and transcribed privately. And although the details remain unclear, circumstantial evidence suggests that Cayce conducted psychic readings for President Woodrow Wilson, as he sought to make peace in the aftermath of the "war to end all wars." Cayce predicted the failure of prohibition, the great stock market crash, the beginning and end of two world wars, the deaths of two presidents, and made startling assertions about the second coming of Christ and the next millennium.

Despite the overwhelming success of his medical readings, and despite the fact that the recipients of many of these readings were some of the richest and most influential people in the country, Edgar Cayce would spend much of his adult life living in poverty, moving from home to home, constantly under threat of being persecuted for fortune-telling or practicing medicine without a license. His readings were often conducted in makeshift conditions and sometimes had to be transcribed on sheets of recycled wrapping paper. At times, he didn't have enough money to feed his children and had to rely on his friends and in-laws to bail him out of debt—or even jail.

That Edgar Cayce persevered and continued giving readings for four decades was perhaps the greatest miracle of his life. And however inseparable the readings became from the man who gave them, it was not his trance communications that endeared him most to family and friends. A humble, kind, gentle, and affectionate man, Edgar preferred the company of children over and above his many rich and famous acquaintances. He invented card games to entertain visitors, bottled his own preserves, kept a dazzling garden, and maintained a lively correspondence with a vast array of people whom he had never met—from child prodigies and bank presidents to railway conductors and undertakers. Though demands on his time were so great that ap­pointments sometimes had to be scheduled months in advance, he rarely missed his weekly Bible study class and never turned anyone away who was in genuine need.

Like the engine on the locomotive that had brought him from Bowling Green to Hopkinsville to treat Thomas House Jr., a powerful force drove Edgar out of what might otherwise have been a comfortable and ordinary existence as a church deacon, photographer, and husband. Exactly where he was going and what he would find when he arrived were questions he hadn't yet answered on that cold February night—nor had he, in fact, even begun to ask them. That his journey would be helpful to others was not in doubt. The life of Thomas House Jr. was evidence of that. That he had the courage to overcome his fears and, as he said, "step out into the light," made his journey all the more remarkable, given how frightening and blinding the glare of that light could sometimes be. His life became a series of sometimes joyful, often excruciating steps toward self-discovery, and although he may have never fully grasped the unimaginable forces that had chosen him as a messenger, he would one day discover what he believed to be the real purpose of his work.

As Edgar Cayce himself, in trance, once said: "There are no shortcuts to knowledge or wisdom or understanding... these must be lived and experienced by each and every soul."