Spencer Lewis, founder of the Rosicrucian order of California. Cerve reportedly provided a synopsis from ancient Chinese manuscripts that were brought to California in his 1931 book, Lemuria. The book contains some references to Atlantis and a map showing Atlantis in the Mid-Atlantic.
Edgerton Sykes
Sykes (1894-1983) was a member of both the British diplomatic service and the Royal Geographic Society. He published two journals, New World Antiquity and Atlantis, for several decades and amassed a vast library of books, periodicals, and short articles on Atlantis published in nearly every world language. Sykes came to believe that the Americas were related to Atlantis and even focused on the idea that Cuba was Atlantis just before his death. Sykes collection of books and other materials was acquired by the Edgar Cayce Foundation and are housed at the Association For Research and Enlightenment Library in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Phylos
In the summer of 1883, a teenager named Frederich Spencer Oliver was helping survey a mining claim near Mt. Shasta for his father. His task was to pound wooden stakes into the ground, number them, and then make a written note on the number and location of each stake. As he worked through the day he realized that his writing hand was trembling. Inexplicably, he grabbed the pencil and pad he was using, and to his astonishment, found that his hand began writing seemingly as if by its own free will. As the tale goes, over the next three years Oliver completed an amazing story that was published in 1894 under the title, A Dweller on Two Planets. The book is supposedly a historical account of Atlantis told to Oliver through automatic writing by the Tibetan master Phylos. Phylos’ story was based on recollections he (Phylos) had of past lives on Atlantis.
The book reads, at times, like a daily journal relating tedious, mundane details. At other times, the book is mystifying. It goes into depth about the Atlantean government (even occasionally quoting labor laws) and describes various portions of Atlantis. One of Phylos’ past lives was given as occurring in 11,160 B.C. According to Phylos, the ancient Atlanteans established colonies in North and South America, Eastern Europe, and portions of Asia and Africa. Phylos mentioned that souls have “sojourns,” but in a curious section, he flatly refused to answer the question of whether life existed on other planets, although he added that we would eventually know the answer.
Phylos’ Atlanteans used electricity and had both airships and submarines. The airships were called vailx and were of varying sizes. Curiously, the electricity on Atlantis was said to be created by capturing the motions of the tides.
The location of Atlantis, was from the West Indies to Gibraltar—a single landmass basically encompassing the current Atlantic Ocean. Phylos claimed that Atlantis went through three days and nights of natural disasters before a final blow ended the continent’s existence. After a brief tremble, the entire island continent sank “like a stone” to a depth of about one mile. He also reported that a 1300-foot-high wall of water was created by the disaster. This massive tsunami destroyed almost everything as it circled the world.
Some aspects related in the book have similarities to Cayce’s Atlantis. For example, the ideas that souls are able to travel in the astral plane and communicate with physical beings have parallels in the Cayce readings. Phylos, like Cayce, also maintained that a record of each individual’s earthly existence was imprinted on the astral plane and that the souls of Atlanteans were now incarnating in America. Phylos is particularly relevant to the Cayce story since in 1933 (reading 282-5) the sleeping Cayce was asked, “Is the book ‘A Dweller on Two Planets’ by Phylos the Tibetan based on truth …?” Cayce replied, “As viewed by an entity separated from the whole, yes. As TRUTH, that may be implied by one that looks only to the Lamb, to the Son as a leader, no. Choose thou.”
Countless others have formulated both scholarly and expeditionbased theories of Atlantis and in recent years, a virtual avalanche of new Atlantis speculations have been made. In a later chapter, these will be summarized along with research that has been done on Cayce’s specific statements on the lost land. But this chapter has sought to provide a background of the early scientific speculations on Atlantis as well as summarize the psychic information that various people have presented. As we show in the next chapters, Cayce’s visions of Atlantis are fully in line with the story Plato related but have major differences with other psychically derived material.
3
Edgar Cayce’s Story: How the Father of American Holistic Medicine Envisioned Atlantis
Conditions, thoughts, activities of men in every clime are things; as thoughts are things. They make their impressions upon the skein of time and space … They become as records that may be read by those in accord or attuned to such a condition.
Edgar Cayce explaining the Akashic Record (1936) Reading 3976-16
Cayce’s story of Atlantis has entranced countless people, starting in the 1920s, when the first of his psychic readings on Atlantis took place. His story of Atlantis is quite different from the material of other psychics as well as from Atlantis theorists. For example, Cayce was quite specific about one area: where a portion of Atlantis would be found and even when it would be found—the Bahamas, in 1968 or 1969. As we shall see in a later chapter, that prediction may well have been realized. Another important reason Cayce’s story is so different is the nature of his psychic readings wherein the Atlantis material was detailed. Most of the Atlantis readings were not about Atlantis per se. They concerned the past lives of specific people who came to Cayce for help in understanding their present lives.
There is one other fundamental difference between Cayce and the many others who have speculated about Atlantis. Cayce was, of course, a psychic. But he was unlike all the other psychics who have lived, and he was quite different from the other psychics who had visions of Atlantis, in this important way: Virtually everything Cayce said during his psychic readings was written down. Cayce’s complete readings have been made available for researchers on a searchable CD-ROM and are also available on the Internet for members of the A.R.E. Thus all of Cayce’s psychic statements are amenable to validation. What other psychics—or skeptics—can make the same claim?
Cayce’s Life
Edgar Cayce (pronounced, KAY-see) was born on a farm near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on March 18, 1877. As a child, he displayed unusual powers of perception. At the age of six, he told his parents that he could see and talk with “visions,” sometimes of relatives who had recently died, and even angels. He could also sleep with his head on his schoolbooks and awake with a photographic recall of their contents, even visualizing the pages of books. However, after completing the seventh grade, he left school—which was not unusual for boys at that time. But because of his unusual abilities, the young Cayce became well-known in the Hopkinsville area.
Edgar Cayce. Source—Edgar Cayce Foundation.
When Edgar was twenty-one years old, he developed a paralysis of the throat muscles, which caused him to lose his voice. He was a clerk in a small bookstore in Hopkinsville at the time, and the problem threatened his job. Doctors were unable to find a physical cause or a remedy for Cayce’s condition, and one night he found himself at a demonstration by a stage hypnotist performing in Hopkinsville. The hypnotist asked for volunteers and, because he was a local celebrity, the young Cayce was urged by the crowd to go to the stage. Under hypnosis, Edgar could speak, but after he emerged from the trance, the paralysis returned.
After hearing from friends that he had talked during the trance, Edgar turned to Al Layne, a Hopkinsville hypnotist and osteopath. Cayce asked Layne to hypnotize him and then, during the
