Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Jerome Clark
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ask it to diagnose the affliction.
The experiment was conducted at the Cayce residence on the afternoon of March 31, with Leslie and Carrie looking on (and Edgar’s sisters Annie and Mary sneaking a view through the keyhole). Layne put Edgar into a hypnotic state and said, “You are now asleep and will be able to tell us what we want to know. You have before you the body of Edgar Cayce. Describe his condition and tell us what is wrong.” After a few moments of inaudible mumbling Cayce’s voice came through clearly: “Yes. We can see the body.”
Referring to Cayce in the third person, the voice went on to characterize the vocal problems as of psychological origin. “Nerve strain” had paralyzed some of the vocal muscles. The problem could be cured through hypnotic suggestion that blood circulate through the affected area. As soon as Layne spoke the words, the voice replied that the circulation was starting to flow. Layne and the Cayces could see the neck and chest turn pink as the blood proceeded to flow so vigorously that Leslie loosened the collar to help its movement. Twenty minutes into the treatment, Cayce’s voice declared, “The vocal chords are perfectly normal now. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal, and that after that the body awaken.”
Once awake, Cayce spat into his handkerchief and soaked it with blood. Then he said, “Hello. Hey, I can talk.”
He would suffer relapses about once a month for the next year, but each time they responded to the sort of treatment he underwent on March 31. Layne remarked that if Cayce could diagnose himself, he surely could do so for others, and he volunteered himself as the first test subject. In trance Cayce told Layne how to treat a persistent gastrointestinal inflammation with exercise and meditation. On awakening, Cayce had no memory of anything, and Layne had to show him his notes. He was subsequently cured.
Cayce’s followers would think of his unconscious self as “The Source,” which referred to itself in the first person plural and as separate from Cayce himself.
Thus was Cayce’s career as psychic healer launched. At first those who approached him were confined to family members and local friends, but as time went by, Cayce’s fame spread, and soon requests for treatment were arriving in the mail from strangers who had read about his gifts in newspaper articles. Cayce found that he could conduct readings at a distance with persons he had not met or would ever meet. He asked only for voluntary donations and never got rich from his apparent clairvoyance, even when he tried to use it in business ventures, notably in Texas oil fields in the 1920s. As always, he had no conscious memory of what he spoke while entranced.
Cayce’s followers would think of his unconscious self as “The Source,” which referred to itself in the first person plural and as separate from Cayce himself. In later years alleged discarnates manifested through Cayce in the fashion of a more conventional spirit medium. Most spectacularly, a loud, haughty entity claiming to be the Archangel Michael appeared from time to time.
The stories told of Cayce’s seemingly miraculous gifts remain, of course, contentious. Skeptics reject them, unsurprisingly, as inherently impossible, insisting that they amount to no more than anecdotes, regardless of apparent documentation. Only the most extreme critics, however, have judged Cayce anything other than honorably intentioned. He did not get rich from the exploitation of his talents. Numerous individuals swore that he healed them, and it is surely futile to quarrel with their assessments of their own health status. All that can be said with reasonable certainty, perhaps, is that our understanding of the world in some areas is far from firm, that personalities and abilities like Cayce’s exist at the fringes of knowledge, and that at this stage conclusions about them ought not to be reached dogmatically.
Cayce died on January 3, 1945, but his work continues in the Virginia Beach-based Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), founded in 1931. A small library of books, including several comprehensive biographies (the first published in 1943, the latest in 2000), examines Cayce’s life, teachings, and related subjects.
From 1923 onward, Cayce’s readings often incorporated references to sitters’ past lives, though reincarnation plays no role in Christianity. In fact, at first the comments — of which, as always, he had no conscious awareness and which, also as always, were pronounced in the first-person plural pronoun—startled and disturbed him. In due course he came to accept them and to believe that family members and close associates had all experienced numerous incarnations together. Many of these could be traced back to the lost continent of Atlantis.
The Atlantis stories amount to a creation myth, a marriage of Genesis to a fantastic tale presumably manufactured in Cayce’s unconscious imagination, inspired in part by occult materials to which Cayce had been exposed. The telling of the epic took place over a period of years and involved some 600 life readings. Allusions to the subject go back to some of the first readings after 1923—with Atlantis referred to also as Alta or Poseidia—but early 1927 readings for Edgar Evans Cayce, Edgar’s 14-year-old son, brought the subject into focus and made it clear, at least to those who took The Source at its word, that Atlantis was to be considered a “real” place, evidence for which still could be uncovered if one were willing to engage in the effort, however difficult, to seek it out.
On February 27, 1927, a life reading informed him that his already evident engineering and mechanical skills had come to him in a past life in Poseidia and that they had served him well through all subsequent incarnations. Three days later, in a followup reading in which the young Cayce asked questions about the nature of Atlantis, The Source began to provide details which eventually—especially through concentrated readings over a period in 1932—would lay out a rich, complex history of a magnificent kingdom from which all of humanity had sprung. Only Cayce’s most devoted followers, some of them still endeavoring to prove the real-world truth of the readings, believe it to represent consensus-level reality. Still, it is quite a story.
It begins with God and, as in Genesis, his command “Let there be light.” In this case, however, “light” meant a being named Amilius, the first soul entity God created around 10,000,000 years ago. Other souls, all of light, followed, but Amilius remained the principal one and uniquely close to the Creator. Together the two fashioned spirits in their image; these spirits headed earthward so that they could incarnate in self-generated physical forms. They sought experiences of taste, touch, smell, and sex unavailable to them as immaterial shapes. Unfortunately, contrary to plans, they found themselves trapped in inferior biological bodies, modeled on animals but with embellishments that generated satyrs, mermaids, unicorns, and other creatures preserved in mythological memory. Amilius transformed himself into Adam and, accompanied by “twin soul” Eve, manifested on Earth—in five different places at once with five different skin colors representing the varying races—in “superior” (present-day Homo sapiens) physical form, intending to lead the other Earth entities back to God. White people appeared first in the Carpathian Mountains, black people in northern Africa, yellow people in the Gobi Desert, and brown people in the Andes and Lemuria. The people of Atlantis had red-hued skin.
A 1933 map depicts the location of Atlantis during the time of the Ice Age, when the water levels of the oceans were much lower (Mary Evans Picture Library).
The earliest civilized order to develop among the new humans—100,000 years ago—was Atlantis, where Amilius/Adam and other followers of God built a temple to celebrate the “law of one,” what we would call Christ Consciousness. As large as Europe, Atlantis was a huge land mass stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean—in other words all across the North Atlantic—with islands scattered around it. Its capital city was Poseidia, open and unwalled, situated on a hill overlooking the ocean.
The Atlanteans were giants whose diets consisted of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and goat’s milk. A typical lifespan stretched a thousand years. Atlantis’ technology was in many ways advanced even beyond our own. Their principal achievement was something