to be reminded that Cayce was booked ahead for months, except for the most severe emergencies. They each needed a time given for their appointment, and instructions to keep the period in a meditative state of asking for help from the divine. Not a few of them also needed encouragement just to go on coping with their personal traumas. Evidently Cayce would like to find a plan to allow him to write personally to each inquirer, feeling a responsibility to all those who reached out to him across the bounds of normal reality. But his was a hopeless hope. Even with a full platoon of stenographers taking down his words, he could never answer so many letters individually. Yet one could sympathize with his desire.
For these were not fan mail. They were not, except in a few instances, notes from curiosity seekers. The bulk were accounts of genuine and sometimes desperate need. Each told of pain at the center of a life, whether of the writer or someone close, often a child or relative. Not a few of the envelopes were from overseas, including some in foreign languages but most on the thin, blue, folded V-Mail from military bases. One handwritten note I picked from the top of a pile began, “Mr. Cayce, I am dying.”
Perhaps if one stood at the ear of God and heard the anguished prayers of a given night, one would discover just the kinds of cries that were scrawled and typed on these thousands of letters and wires. Cayce grew quiet as the rest of us pulled out letters at random and read portions of them aloud. It was clear that he knew where the responsibility fell for acting on all this need. When he spoke tersely, it was with strong, compressed feeling and addressed only one question: pain. His deepest promise, which he saw as the ground of his ability, had been to lift pain from sufferers. Here was pain beyond measure. How was he to keep his word?
I made notes, as I had been doing all evening. One letter was from a mother whose son was in prison, falsely accused, she said. Another was written in failing handwriting from someone with advanced multiple sclerosis, given no hope for recovery but only the prospect of slowly disintegrating as a human being. A teenager wrote that she was pregnant and asked what to tell her parents and whether to confront the young man soon to be a father. A man wrote about his wife’s convulsions, slowly taking her away from him and their four children. An older person wrote that he was dying of cancer, asking how to make his remaining life count most, if Cayce were unable to prolong it. A mother enclosed a photograph of her son missing in action in the South Pacific, begging Cayce to locate him. A youngster, not knowing the modes of Cayce’s aid, explained that her Scottie dog, the love of her life, was lost and that she needed Cayce’s unusual help to find him. A woman wrote of her sister in a mental institution and hoped Cayce might find a cure to get her out and returned to her family. A retired mechanic scrawled in a shaky hand his greetings whose cordiality overleaped spelling, “Best whiches,” as he asked for aid with his arthritis.
We had begun reading aloud from the letters in good spirits, to get a feel for their content. But as we read further, our voices began to trail off. It was too much. Who could bear all of this suffering?
To be sure, a few of the letters we read that first night made us chuckle. Someone wanted to know what to do for toes that “curl up when they are cold.” A woman wanted advice on what color to dye her hair to go best with her eyes. Several sought guidance on choosing between lovers or possible mates, ready to consult Cayce without hesitation on such weighty decisions. But even the small requests, which brought relief by contrast with the heroic needs, were obviously important to the petitioners: bunions, bad breath, snoring, big feet, small breasts, and an unbearable employer. Surprisingly few people asked to be told of their past lives.
Many who wrote referred to Cayce’s ability as a gift from God.
Some appeared merely pious, voicing stereotypes. But others did not. They seemed to be saying, “The universe ought to produce just what you are doing. As soon as I read your story, I knew it was right.” I made a note to explore what made people assign different types of meaning to Cayce’s gift (and later wrote my doctoral dissertation on this same theme).16 Even if Cayce’s counsel proved sometimes flawed, he had an unusual opportunity to help those who so clearly opened their hearts to him, pouring out in letters their renewed sense of the goodness and closeness of the divine.
A Small Dying
But his opportunity to serve was also his threat. Gertrude explained, when we asked how he could possibly schedule readings for so many people at the rate of two per day, that he had taken to squeezing several readings into each period. Now at the morning time of eleven and the afternoon time of three-thirty he was giving two or four or six—or even more, if they were short checkups. This meant he was unconscious each time not for forty-five minutes but up to twice that length or even two hours. She was obviously concerned, citing trance counsel some time ago which indicated he could safely do two to five readings a day when in good health. Under our questioning she spelled out the danger to her husband’s well-being, and perhaps even to his life, as he tried to respond to the pleas in so many letters. Cayce turned away and paced the floor, obviously determined not to be deterred.
She explained that from both physicians and their own readings they had discovered his state was not a simple hypnotic trance. It was a deep change in Edgar’s entire body, as we would see. They were told it was near to a death coma, with most of his body functions greatly slowed or suspended. His daily work was a kind of small dying. They had to be careful to give him a precise suggestion at each session, just before he awakened, that all of his vital processes would be restored to normal, concluding, “Now, perfectly balanced and perfectly rested, you will wake up.” Once, when Gertrude had hurried this suggestion a bit mechanically as she guided him out of the trance, a voice broke out of Cayce with the warning that he was like a window blind stretched to its absolute limits. A little more tension and the damage would be irreparable.
Indeed, there had been a few times that he gave readings while too tired or distraught, when they could not waken him with the usual hypnotic suggestion. Instead his breathing had grown slower and slower, his skin color ashen, and his body processes evidently weaker as they tried frantically to return him to consciousness. Twice the family had ended up on their knees beside his studio couch, where he lay barely breathing. They simply prayed aloud and wept, because they did not know anything else to do until he finally recovered.
Back in the Manhattan Project it had seemed a small matter for others to determine to pay the price to do what Cayce did. Now that was less clear, and I asked Cayce whether he thought successors could be found to share this load with him. He nodded, saying that his readings had promised this repeatedly. But, he added, he thought that many could be shown how to get their own answers to the problems on which they sought his aid. Part of my task (as it had been his son’s) would be to study his trance for leads and to prepare materials for future researchers on this very question. That would begin the next day.
14Pit, or Corner the Market, manufactured by Parker Brothers.
15Bro, Margueritte Harmon, “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” Coronet, September 1943.
16Bro, Harmon H., The Charisma of the Seer: A Study in the Phenomenology of Religious Leadership, unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of Chicago Libraries, 1955.
CHAPTER 3
When I Am Absent from the Body
What took place in the morning and afternoon trance sessions, in the months that followed when I heard and took notes on some six hundred of Cayce’s readings, was a profound shock. Nothing could adequately prepare one for the amount of swift helpfulness that flowed from the unconscious man.
His outward procedures were simple
