Edgar Cayce

Edgar Cayce (March 18, 1877 - January 3, 1945) was an American from rural Kentucky, a devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher with little formal education, who became the most documented psychic of the early twentieth century.

Beginning in his early twenties he discovered that, lying down and entering a self-induced sleep-like trance, he could answer questions in a voice not his ordinary own - first diagnosing illnesses and recommending treatments for people he had never met, later addressing reincarnation, dreams, prophecy, and spiritual philosophy.

Because he delivered this material while apparently asleep, journalist Jess Stearn’s 1967 biography fixed the popular epithet “the sleeping prophet.” His stenographer recorded the sessions, and roughly 14,000 of these “readings” survive in transcript.

Cayce founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in 1931 in Virginia Beach to study and preserve the readings, and it remains the custodian of his archive. His material is presented here as a sincere and historically significant experiment in trance-derived knowledge, not as established fact: the medical and prophetic content of the readings is unverified, and Cayce himself remained uneasy about reconciling his trance pronouncements with his orthodox Christian faith.

His importance to the mind-power lineage lies in popularizing, for a mass American audience, the ideas that consciousness survives the body, that the soul reincarnates, and that mind and attitude bear directly on health.