He’s the greatest fellow in the world when he’s asleep
He seemed constantly surprised and baffled by his unique gift, fearful it might be a source of evil but convinced until his death that it came from God
By 1910, no less an authority than The New York Times devoted a credulous full-page to the 33-year-old under the headline, “Illiterate Man Becomes A Doctor When Hypnotized.” The piece devoted considerable column space to one Dr. W. H. Ketchum, who testified to the man’s abilities before a meeting of the National Society of Homeopathic Physicians in Pasadena.
The piece cites several instances of his unorthodox — but seemingly undeniable — approach to healing, before concluding with a favorable comparison to Jesus Christ.
Ketchum told the crowd,
[Y]ou may ask why has a man with such powers not been before the public and received the endorsement of the profession, one and all, without fear or favor? can truly answer by saying they are not ready to receive such as yet. Even Christ himself was rejected, for ‘unless they see signs and wonders they will not believe.’ I would appreciate the advice and suggestions of my co-workers in this broad field as to the best method of putting my man in the way of helping suffering humanity, and would be glad to have you send me the name and address of your most complex case and I will try to prove what I have endeavored to describe.
His work would eventually be embraced with open arms by much of the country. By the end of Edgar Cayce’s life, the clairvoyant had recorded north of 14,000 readings and won an audience with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Thomas Edison -- as well as, reportedly, his long-time rival Nikola Tesla.
It was, by any measure, a remarkable rise for a native of the Kentucky backwoods forced to drop out of school in the ninth grade. And while any comparison to the Christian messiah is undoubtedly a stretch, Cayce’s youth was dotted with similarly miraculous tales. Most notable, was a year-long battle with laryngitis at the turn of the century, which left the 23-year-old unable to speak.
Local doctors were baffled. The condition was briefly cured when traveling hypnotist "The Laugh Man” put Cayce under. He found himself able to speak, only to once again lose the ability when he awoke. After 20 minutes with another local hypnotist, Cayce proclaimed the treatment over, this time waking up to find his voice returned to normal. It was his knack for making predictions in a self-induced trance state that earned him the posthumous nickname, "The Sleeping Prophet."
“I tell you,” Leslie Burr Cayce said of his son, “he’s the greatest fellow in the world when he’s asleep.”
In 1943, Coronet Magazine published a similarly breathless account of Cayce’s abilities. Minister and missionary to China Margueritte Harmon Bro recounts sitting in on the clairvoyant’s twice-daily sessions for a full week.
“Mr. Cayce walked over to the couch, took off his coat, loosened his collar, and lay down,” Bro writes. “His wife spread an afghan over him. No shades were drawn, no incense lighted. In no more than two or three minutes Mr. Cayce appeared to be sleeping quietly and his wife gave him Betty’s name and address.”
She describes a devoted healer who charged a “nominal fee” for his work – precisely the reason, she explained, that Cayce was not among the world’s richest men. The piece did, however, further catapult him to national prominence. Over the decades, Cayce was credited with correctly predicting the 1929 stock market crash and both World Wars. His beliefs regarding the veracity of the lost civilization of Atlantis, on the other hand have thus far proven inconclusive.
Cayce’s 1934 predictions regarding the end of the world, can be said to split the difference between his life-long devotion to Christian mysticism and an eerie sort of prescience.
The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. The upper portion of Europe will be changed as in the twinkling of an eye. Land will appear off the east coast of America. There will be the upheavals in the Arctic and in the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas, and there will be shifting then of the poles - so that where there has been those of a frigid or the semi-tropical will become the more tropical, and moss and fern will grow.
In spite of newspaper claims, Cayce was not, in fact, illiterate (though he had, at times, claimed to have memorized a book by simply sleeping on it). He was, instead, a voracious consumer of the printed word – a fact his many critics believed played into his celebrated gift for prediction.
“There seems no doubt about Cayce's sincerity,” science writer and skeptic Martin Gardner wrote not long after Cayce’s death. “He was a kindly, gentle man—with a round boyish face, gray-blue eyes behind rimless glasses, and a receding chin. He seemed constantly surprised and baffled by his unique gift, fearful it might be a source of evil but convinced until his death that it came from God.”
Gardner, too, claims to believe the sincerity of Cayce’s trances, but as with his other predictions, suggests his diagnoses were, at best, gleaned from the books he vacuumed up. At worst, he noted that they were downright unscientific.
“Most of Cayce's early trances were given with the aid of an osteopath who asked him questions while he was asleep, and helped later in explaining the reading to the patient,” writes Gardner. “There is abundant evidence that Cayce's early association with osteopaths and homeopaths had a major influence on the character of his readings.”
Sources:
The strange tale of Edgar Cayce, Alabama's Sleeping Prophet https://www.al.com/living/2017/10/the_tale_of_edgar_cayce_alabam.html
Edgar Cayce - The Early Years http://www.museumsofhopkinsville.org/edgar-cayce/
Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1910/10/09/102048830.html?pageNumber=63
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science By Martin Gardner