 |
|
A GenePoool.com Essay
Cayce
Of all the stalwart examples of genuine psychic powers to be offered from time to time by the true believers in such things, Edgar Cayce, "the sleeping prophet," is probably the most popular. The guy had a heck of a track record, we are told, which is interesting, because I don't think any of them really put in much time examining his record very closely.
Cayce's life history is a hodgepodge of a large variety of fascinating pseudoscientific matters. He touched on prophesy, homeopathy, osteopathy, dowsing, spiritualism, reincarnation, Atlantis, and faith healing. Fortunately for all of us there is such a place as the Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia, which keeps all of the voluminous records intact for all of us to study.
Edgar Cayce showed signs early on that he was a fantasy-prone individual. As a child he had visions and heard disembodied voices speaking to him, and had the occasional conversation with angels. The title "fantasy-prone" is an actual psychological term, and it refers to individuals who, while being otherwise normal and perfectly sane, slip into daydreams, unprovoked, that are so real they have trouble distinguishing between what happens in their imaginations and what has actually taken place. Sort of a Walter Mitty syndrome. It's the byproduct of a fairly unique brain chemistry, and it can be reproduced in laboratory conditions with the right electrodes in the right spots. One of the most interesting aspects of the fantasy-prone person is their absolute sincerity of the genuineness of their visions.
Sincerity is what Cayce had going for him, more than anything else. He was a simple, kind man who believed in his gifts and did not ask for any money for their use. This last fact has been used many times over as proof that he was the real deal, although I don't know why. Just because he wasn't a con man doesn't mean he therefore had genuine powers.
When he was twenty-four he began diagnosing people while in a self-induced hypnotic trance. Much has been made of the fact that he had no medical background, and was not well-schooled or well-read, but this is largely inaccurate. While he didn't go to school beying ninth grade, he read a great deal, and in his early days he was assisted by an osteopath. Osteopathy in Cayce's days bore a much closer resemblance to the pseudomedical-- like chiropractic, or acupuncture-- than it did to anything medically valid. It dealt, as it does today, with the musculo-skeletal system, but also considered most every illness as stemming from problems with that system. Many of Cayce's early diagnoses sound like they came directly from the mouth of an osteopath.
Cayce's familiarity with homeopathy and old-fashioned home remedies is also evident. (He was assisted with many diagnoses by homeopaths as well.) He routinely prescribed, as the cure to his osteopathic diagnoses, bizarre and frequently hard-to-get concoctions, like "bed-bug juice" and "oil of smoke."
After focusing primarily on patients who were in his presence, Cayce expanded his repertoire to include diagnosing, sight-unseen, patients who had written letters to him. This is the most impressive aspect of Cayce's lore. A friend or relative of the sick party would usually read the letter to him while he was in his trance, and he'd drift about in his semi-conscious state until he declared "I have the body" and then he would rattle off his diagnosis and cure.
So what was happening here? Let's begin with what should be a well-known fact regarding any disease. Sometimes, it just goes away. This is something I'll get into at length another time when I discuss faith healing, but it's also relevant in discussions of most pseudoscientific medical practices. If you are diagnosed by a purveyor of snake oil as having a terrible medical condition, and it turns out-- because the practitioner in this case has no idea what the heck he's talking about-- that you only have the flu, and you take his harmless, pharmaceutically inert "cure," you will eventually get better. This does not mean the snake oil you swallowed had anything to do with it whatsoever. More serious conditions, such as cancer, can, and often will, go into spontaneous remission. Again, whatever bizarre cure you've been prescribed had nothing to do with it.
Cayce was fond of phrases such as "I feel that..." and "it seems as if..." in his diagnoses. His vagueness allowed for a fairly easy out in case, as shocking as this may seem, he turned out to be wrong. This is a pattern we'll see again later in the acts of many psychics, such as the currently popular Van Praagh, a man who apparently talks to heaven a lot. Vagueness invites the person on the other end of the analysis to fill in their own details in the same way a horoscope reader adapts his or her life to the vague auguries in the daily paper.
The Cayce archives are filled with letters from grateful people who were cured by him, which is all well and good except that the dead can't write letters. To drive this point home rather sharply, Edgar Cayce's wife died of tuberculosis despite the remedy of "fumes of apple brandy from a charred keg" which her husband prescribed for her.
Then there is a much more sticky issue. On more than one occasion, Cayce prescribed remedies to patients who had already died. This is a rather embarrassing detail that his champions fortunately provide manifold explanations for, such as that the patient had a negative attitude (not surprisingly, given that they were dead) and that the person who read the letter was thinking of a different person. And there's Cayce's own explanation, which in addition to being a fascinating read, also gives you an idea of exactly how lucid this man was:
"...if the proper consideration is given all the facts and factors concerning each character of information sought, as has been given oft, the information answers that which is sought at the time in relationships to the conditions that exist in those forms through which the impressions are made for tangibility or for observation in the mind of others."
If any of you readers out there can figure out what this means, I think they have a job for you in Virginia.
Medical diagnosis is not all we remember Edgar Cayce for, however. There is also his remarkable skill as a prophet and seer. I'm still looking for the evidence of this. He predicted, for instance, that the Lindbergh baby had been taken by three or four individuals, was being kept in a brown two story house that used to be green, then was moved from New Haven to Jersey City, and that the baby is not well. This last part is the only thing he came close to getting right, as the baby was found weeks later buried in the flower bed beneath a window of the Lindberghs' home, the same spot he'd occupied since the night of his kidnapping.
Cayce also predicted that in 1968 or '69, a portion of Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic. Oddly, this hasn't happened. And there's this hoary prediction:
"The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. The upper portion of Europe will be changed as in the twinkling of an eye. Land will appear off the east coast of America. There will be the upheavals in the Arctic and in the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanoes in the Torrid areas, and there will be the shifting then of the poles-- so that where there have been those of a frigid or semi-tropical will become the more tropical, and the moss and fern will grow. And these will begin in those periods in '58 to '98."
None of Cayce's predictions seem to have come to pass, which has me wondering exactly where the "prophet" part comes in.
At one point Cayce teamed up with Henry Gross, a noted contemporary dowser, and the two of them attempted to locate buried treasure. Remarkably, they failed. Defenders of Cayce have argued that the treasure was there once, but Edgar was looking into the past by accident. Of course.
Cayce also jumped on board the reincarnation bandwagon when it was a fairly new concept in the Western world. He would use is powers to tell people about past lives, and he himself believed he had once been a disciple of Christ, an Egyptian priest, and an angel-like being that hung out in Eden before Adam and Eve mucked up everything.
Looking back at all of this, I have no idea
why Edgar Cayce is such a big deal. His diagnoses were at best
harmless and at worse dangerously inaccurate, and his prophesies
haven't come true. And yet so many people consider him the last
word in proof of psychic abilities, especially the folks down
at the Association for Research and Enlightenment. I can't resist
asking, why can't they let Sleeping Prophets lie?
© 2000, Gene Doucette
| |
|