as Cayce) to get wounds healed and minds stretched, or to call entire peoples to new ways of life.
First-Hand Reports
Still, Cayce’s capacity seemed so outrageous, so utterly unlikely, that I might have dismissed it as impossible, but for firsthand reports from those who had sought his strange counsel, called “readings.” Among these were friends of my family, such as the levelheaded Myrtle Walgreen, who years before her present wealth and community leadership had baked the first pies and cooked the first soups in what was now an extensive drugstore chain. She sought Cayce out. Another was Lowell Hoit, the widely read and distinguished head of Chicago’s Board of Trade. A third was Sherwood Eddy, the author and respected leader of the worldwide YMCA, who had not only secured Cayce’s counsel, but gone to see him in action. Then there was my mother.
As a longtime contributor to the Christian Century, a liberal Protestant journal (some of whose editors were leading members of our innovative home church adjoining the university), she had been sent a copy of Cayce’s biography to review or discard. Perhaps her skillful handling of religious controversies in the past, which had won her coverage in Time, prompted an editor to think she could make a sensible evaluation of the hardly believable Cayce story. As someone who had written nearly a dozen books of her own on religious subjects, and been the editor of the Congregational periodical, Social Action, she was a demanding reviewer.
In Cayce’s life she found threads of her own, as she traced his growing up in Kentucky, also once her home, and his vigorous lay leadership in the mainline Protestant group called the Christian Church or Disciples of Christ, which had been her family’s heritage since shortly after its beginnings in 1820. Further, she thought she saw in Cayce some of the disciplined idealism of her generation which had led her and my father (now president of Frances Shimer College in western Illinois) to spend a number of years as educational missionaries in China, my birthplace. And while she had no special interest or knowledge in the psychic field, she was deeply drawn to prayer and had published a widely used book of devotions, Every Day a Prayer,8 as well as learned how to meditate from Gerald Heard, the pioneering British anthropologist and philosopher.9 She concluded she had useful perspectives with which to assess Cayce. So on a lecture trip to New York she took a side journey by overnight train to Virginia, where she could meet Cayce, watch him work, and test him thoroughly with a trance evaluation of her health. Having recently been through a complete workup at the noted medical center in Battle Creek, Michigan, she had sufficient records of medical laboratory work, together with reports by specialized physicians, to measure Cayce’s performance with care. Since she was not in any critical medical need, she could simply ask Cayce for help but not demand a remarkable cure.
Her account to me of Cayce’s work, like her review in the Christian Century entitled “Explain It As You Will,” was careful but clearly favorable.10 Cayce was apparently neither a fraud nor self-deluded. He scored bull’s-eyes again and again on confirmable targets in her Battle Creek reports. He then suggested some cogent directions for treatments which her physicians had overlooked and subsequently found useful. Cayce was open and straightforward about his unritualized trance process. To her he seemed modest, with a sense of humor that kept his peculiar talent in perspective. He was committed to research on his work, about which he assured her he remained convinced that “I don’t do anything you can’t do, if you are willing to pay the price.” And he had in fact amassed much helpful data about the ability, built on thousands of case files, for study by any interested specialists. He appeared to have a good, critical mind. His wife and the people drawn around his consulting work seemed genuine and unpretentious. They had the refined Southern dignity and graciousness which my mother knew well from that part of her life when her father had been president of Transylvania University in Kentucky.
Taking On Cayce in Person
If Cayce were not a crook and not a mental case, if he were not a promoter and not a self-appointed messiah, then his efforts might be a huge adventure to explore. When he wrote to my mother that he really needed help (now that both his sons were in the Army) and asked whether I might be interested in working with him for a year, I thought carefully about it.
Would it be proper to go down this strange path in the midst of a brutal war that had already taken the lives of some of my classmates? My draft board had given me a 4-D rating of exemption for study in theology, and I took this privilege very seriously; already I had been to the Navy recruiting office to discover the requirements for the chaplaincy when I completed the needed years of graduate study. The draft authorities indicated that I could take a year for field research, so long as the effort was clearly tied to graduate studies. I outlined a plan to interview not only Cayce but dozens of his associates and those who sought his counsel, collecting data for a later doctoral dissertation. My father thought the design would be sound in his academic circles, and the university assured me that I would not lose my degree track.
It seemed unlikely that someone more authoritative than I, from Chicago or any other university, would get around to investigating Cayce soon. This was wartime. Posters cried out for victory from bulletin boards in gray academic buildings just as loudly as they did from store windows and subway platforms. Platoons of soldiers, airmen, and sailors in distinctive uniforms marched briskly between classes among the stately campus towers. They carried textbooks, not weapons, because this was the Midwest, and invasion was so far unlikely—unless England collapsed under the ceaseless airborne Blitz by the Germans. But the drilling groups swinging their wooden rifles to sharp commands shouted on the Midway made clear that combat was a universal destination. Small lines of troops stepped smartly past libraries that held the treasures of centuries, and past the subdued dark-wood classrooms with arched Gothic windows where Robert Maynard Hutchins as president (and my friend since high school) had led the movement to study classics he called Great Books in a thinking man’s university. It was a time to bend wisdom to technique, to make learning serve conquest. The university did its part, even to opening the atomic husk that would one day release a blinding flash and a mushroom cloud.
My task would be to ask the right questions about Cayce, illuminating the productive potentials of his gift and suggesting how far it might be replicated. Otherwise I would be abandoning my post in a painful time of history, not only in the Manhattan Project, where I would scarcely be missed, but in the hard inner demand on our generation to unscramble a devastated world. I looked on the potential assignment with great seriousness. The gold stars that hung mutely on little cloth squares in windows on many a nearby block, signifying a military death in that family, demanded no less.
Friends posed tough questions, as graduate students should. If Cayce were real, why wasn’t he rich and famous? Why wasn’t he already being used in Washington for the war effort? Why had the Cayce Hospital failed, as did the fledgling but respectable Atlantic University built on his work, with such guidance at hand? How would such a gift—if truly there—ever make mistakes? Surely there was a catch in the story somewhere. Perhaps he had developed some sort of cult, to which the author of his biography belonged. Wouldn’t it destroy one’s perspective and balance to move into his orbit? Better, they said, just to read about him and wait for someone to expose him.
In particular they hammered at the one area where Cayce seemed most vulnerable. It was reincarnation. Midway in his adult life, after twenty-some years of winning increasing respect for his medical counsel, he had been stunned to hear his trusted trances present a view of human psychology and destiny that included being reborn on earth over and over. Many church friends had backed away from him. Physicians consulted him more guardedly.
One might suspend judgment about his capacity to retrieve verifiable information and make sound judgments about medical targets. But to consider that Cayce might be correct about reincarnation required challenging all the major thinkers of Western civilization—except Plato and Origen. If Cayce
