tubercular women, crippled boys, cancerous workmen, arthritic grandmothers knotted in pain—they all find healing. But that’s only the beginning—what really happens to them is what has happened to Mr. and Mrs. Cayce, Gladys Davis [Cayce’s secretary] and some others—they find that “there is a river” of God’s love flowing about us all, only waiting to be tapped by humble minds. The real miracles at Virginia Beach are the radiant, transformed lives, the people who go away realizing that they can actually find God and know Jesus and live like it. They say, “I am my brother’s keeper” and their lives show it. They say, “There is only one God” and all their friends feel it. Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Catholic, Mennonite, Christian Scientist, Humanist, Presbyterian—it goes on like the “Ballad for Americans”—they all find what they are searching for in the work of the readings and Mr. Cayce . . .
Harmon and June Bro moved to Virginia Beach and became close friends with the Cayce family and worked as members of the Cayce office staff. At the time, there was a tremendous increase in requests for Cayce’s readings as a result of the publication of Cayce’s biography, There Is a River, by Thomas Sugrue, which was followed by Margueritte Harmon Bro’s own article in Coronet magazine entitled “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach.” Harmon and June listened to hundreds of readings. They had access to all correspondence, and they had the opportunity to repeatedly see how people’s lives were changed by the Cayce work.
Harmon became interested in psychology and decided to continue graduate work. He went on to Harvard and then to the University of Chicago where he did a doctoral dissertation based on a study of the Edgar Cayce readings. For this dissertation, he coined the following phrase for Edgar Cayce: “a seer in a seerless culture.”
Harmon called the story of Edgar Cayce’s life “one of the most challenging and appealing adventure stories of modern times.” He went on to explain that the story was about much more than a psychic—much more than he had ever expected when he first came to Virginia Beach as a young man:
. . . to call him a psychic is to call an opera star an athlete of the vocal cords. For Cayce’s aid was not simply raw data dumped on frantic seekers, but carefully devised counsel as fraught with values as with information. He spoke not only of organs and tissues and interventions, but of justice and love, and of beauty and holiness, as the context for healing and wholeness. Only a time so impotent for personal and social goodness that it must seize on powers ahead of meaning would be satisfied with labeling him a clairvoyant. To find his visionary yet practical gift, one must remember Judaism’s Baal Shem To combining healing with mystical vistas, Melville viewing the world from the bowels of whales, Blake painting fiery creation, Freud finding darkness and light through sexuality, and Jung glimpsing with Plato the starry heavens of archetypes within human deeps.
Cayce was not fascinated with his own prowess, though others often were. Nobody who knew him well could imagine that he went to bed at night and got up in the morning thinking about his trance skills and how to improve them—any more than he focused on his paranormal abilities outside of trance, such as seeing revealing colors (auras) around others, reading minds, conversing with the recently dead, or previewing the future. His concern was not first of all with powers but with relationships. On the one hand he sought to be deeply and helpfully related to the damaged persons that he served. And on the other hand he sought to be related to the divine, which he saw as the ultimate author of his gifts, within the kind of community and tradition that serves such a source. This was a man who lay down and arose with prayer, not as duty or accomplishment, but as a hunger reaching for companionship with God, seeking to be grasped more than to grasp, so that he might create usefully for those who wept with pain.
Harmon’s book presents an eyewitness account of Cayce at work. It draws upon Harmon’s personal experiences, as well as upon hundreds of interviews with Cayce’s relatives, associates, sufferers seeking aid, and even some disappointed detractors. It presents a story of a man with tremendous gifts, tremendous challenges, and tremendous love for God and the human creation.
When Edgar Cayce died on January 3, 1945, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, he left well over 14,000 documented stenographic records of the telepathic-clairvoyant statements he had given for thousands of people over a period of forty-three years. These documents are referred to as readings. In 1931, Cayce founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) to research, document, and disseminate his psychic information.
The readings constitute one of the largest and most impressive records of psychic perception ever to emanate from a single individual. Together with their relevant records, correspondence, and reports, they have been cross-indexed under thousands of subject headings and placed at the disposal of psychologists, students, writers, and investigators from around the world.
Today, Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. offers membership benefits and services, a magazine, newsletters, publications, conferences, international tours, an impressive volunteer network, the Cayce/Reilly® School of Massotherapy, a Health Center and Spa, a retreat-type camp for children and adults, prison and prayer outreach programs, and A.R.E. contacts around the world. A.R.E. also maintains an affiliation with Atlantic University, which was founded in 1930 by Cayce and some of his closest supporters (AtlanticUniv.edu).
For additional information about the Edgar Cayce work, contact A.R.E., 215 67th Street, Virginia Beach, VA 23451-2061; call (800) 333-4499; or visit the website EdgarCayce.org.
Kevin J. Todeschi
Executive Director & CEO
Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. / Atlantic University
INTRODUCTION
by June Avis Bro
In the spring of 1943, I had no idea that my life and career plans would soon change dramatically. In a few months, I would be married and would leave my master’s program in music at the Chicago Musical College where I had a full scholarship. My future mother-in-law, Margueritte Harmon Bro, would be the change agent.
She had been asked to write a review of There Is a River by Thomas Sugrue. It was truly amazing that in 1943, this prominent Protestant magazine would ask for a review of Sugrue’s book on the life and work of Edgar Cayce and that my future mother-in-law would write it. She was so intrigued that on her next lecture trip to the East Coast, she decided to visit the Cayces. She spent several days with Edgar and Gertrude Cayce and Gladys Davis, Cayce’s secretary. I didn’t know it then, but my future was hanging in the balance.
It turned out that Edgar Cayce was as intrigued by Margueritte Bro as she was by him. She told him that she and her husband had been educational missionaries in China, and that struck a deep chord in Edgar’s soul. He had led youth groups in his church, and his deep desire was to prepare them for the medical missionary field. To add to the excitement, my future mother-in-law and Edgar Cayce discovered that they had grown up in the same church, the Disciples of Christ. You can be sure they had a lot to talk about.
At Edgar’s request, my mother-in-law spoke to the missionary society in his church before he lay down in his modest study to give a reading for her. When he did, she was entranced. She had just returned from the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan after a thorough checkup for various ailments. The physical reading Edgar provided was even more detailed than the hospital printout she had been given. She was so thoroughly impressed that she requested and received life readings for the whole family.
She came home all afire with what she had seen and heard. I was deep into studying the piano at the Chicago Musical College and didn’t have much time to join in on the conversations. But my fiancé, Harmon, was mesmerized. He couldn’t hear enough about Mr. Cayce and his work.
Harmon and I were married
