The Essential Edgar Cayce Read Free Page B

Nevertheless, Cayce and his supporters made several attempts to establish institutions and a school that embodied the readings.

    In that regard, the Cayce Hospital of Research and Enlightenment was founded in Virginia Beach in 1928. Here was a courageous pioneering effort to launch a body-mind-spirit healing facility. But after only two years, it collapsed financially. The same fate befell an advanced educational program Cayce cofounded called Atlantic University. It, too, shut its doors after only two years (only to open again in 1985, exactly forty years after Cayce’s death).

    The remaining years of Edgar Cayce’s life were similarly difficult, with the family usually teetering on the brink of poverty. With the close of Atlantic University and the demise of both the Cayce hospital and the Association of National Investigators—the organization that had supervised the hospital’s development—a few core supporters remained to gather around Cayce. In 1931, they created a new organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, which made Cayce’s clairvoyant services available to members for a fee of twenty dollars. It was no small sum in the Depression era, and it was the principal means by which Cayce supported himself and his family. Yet many of the readings during this time were free of charge because people just didn’t have the money.

    In 1932, some of Cayce’s most ardent followers worked with him to found a study group program. Over the next eleven years, the group received 130 readings on character development and spiritual growth topics. These readings were summarized in essays written by group members and published in a two-volume set titled A Search for God. Topics included “Know Thyself,” “Faith,” “Patience,” and “Wisdom.” In the decades following Edgar Cayce’s death, this program has grown into one of the most important aspects of his legacy, with hundreds of ongoing groups in the United States and in more than thirty countries worldwide.

    The 1930s were complicated for Cayce not only because of depressed economic conditions but also because of difficulties finding recognition for his work. Parapsychology was a budding science, with pioneers such as J. B. Rhine, who had been trained as a botanist but conducted groundbreaking research in psychic ability through the department of psychology at Duke University. There was some passing interest in Cayce’s gifts expressed by a handful of scientists, but these gifts were in turn expressed in probably too anecdotal and uncontrolled a fashion for them. They were much more interested in proving the veracity of ESP under laboratory conditions.

    And so Edgar Cayce had to look to less scientific pathways to gain acceptance. His son Hugh Lynn moved to New York City in 1938 to help produce a regular radio series titled Mysteries of the Mind, to help generate interest in psychic ability generally and in his father’s work particularly. Broadcast on WOR, the programs dealt with various psychic experiences in a dramatized form, but they met with only marginal success.

    It wasn’t until the early 1940s that the mainstream press became aware of Cayce’s gifts. Marguerite Bro, a renowned theologian and author, came to Virginia Beach to personally investigate what she had heard about Cayce’s intuitive healing powers and came away so impressed that she published an article about him in 1942 in Coronet magazine, one of the most widely read periodicals of the time. Letters of inquiry and requests for readings began to pour in.

    But an even more significant publishing event gave Cayce’s work something that had been long sought. In 1943, the lengthy and beautifully written biography of Cayce, There Is a River, was published by Henry Holt. Penned by newspaper reporter and family friend Thomas Sugrue, the book marked a watershed in the public’s appreciation of Cayce’s achievements. Widely praised, it resulted in an even greater influx