Edgar Cayce was born into a farming family in Kentucky in 1877 and was raised within the Disciples of Christ, a church that sought to restore original Christian teachings. He would later state that a winged woman visited him in his childhood, and that he could memorize his schoolbooks by sleeping on them. Cayce’s purported clairvoyant abilities began to manifest in April 1900, when he lost his voice. Local newspapers reported one month later that Cayce was only able to speak above a whisper when under hypnosis.
Unable to continue his career as a salesman, he became a photographer’s apprentice and also started to attend business school. The first published report that his voice had returned full-time came in February 1901. A year later, Cayce publicly attributed his recovery to treatment by A.C. Layne, who called himself an “osteopath and electro-magnetical doctor.” Layne said that he had discovered that Cayce could diagnose patients remotely while in a trance, and hired Cayce as a medical clairvoyant.
Cayce married Gertrude Evans in 1903, and the two lived in Bowling Green, where Cayce worked in a bookshop and continued to assist Lane with clairvoyant diagnoses. Cayce opened his own photography studio, but the facility burned down twice in the space of three years and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. Despite this, Cayce refused to charge for his clairvoyant readings.
Cayce first came to national attention when his readings were featured in a 1910 story in The New York Times. Early in 1911, Cayce offered his first public demonstration of his clairvoyant abilities. Over the next decade, Cayce’s notoriety grew, and he entered into several ill-fated partnerships with entrepreneurs who sought to profit off his readings. Cayce continued to refuse any direct payment for his readings, including the notable rejection of $100 a day — approximately $2,500 per day in today’s dollars — for readings on the cotton market from a merchant. He did, however, participate in efforts to use psychic powers for the selection of sites for oil exploration in Texas in the early 1920s.
Cayce had steadfastly refused to call himself a spiritualist, maintaining that he was a Christian. But by 1922, he was holding public talks on topics including reincarnation and the evolution of the soul, occasionally addressing local chapters of the Theosophical Society. In the fall of 1923, he established the Cayce Institute of Psychic Research, and finally began working as a professional psychic, employing a small staff.
New York stockbroker Morton Blumenthal was both interested in Cayce’s readings and in his esoteric philosophy, and purchased a home for the Cayces in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In 1927, the Association of National Investigations was established in that city, with Blumenthal as president and Cayce as secretary and treasurer. Moseley Brown, head of the psychology department at Washington and Lee University, became convinced of Cayce’s abilities and joined the association in 1928. In addition to offering readings and researching psychic abilities, the association also studied alternative medical treatments for common ailments.
The association became the Association for Research and Enlightenment in June 1931, as Cayce’s topics broadened to include soulmates, past lives, dream analysis, and readings from the Akashic records, an astral compendium of all wisdom postulated by early Theosophists. Cayce also claimed to have evidence of the past existence of Atlantis obtained from his readings, and he delivered his first public talk on Atlantis in 1932, several months before the A.R.E. held its first annual congress.
In the early years of the 1930s, Cayce repeatedly predicted that multiple cataclysmic events, including the total destruction of San Francisco by an earthquake, would take place in 1936. The failure of this prediction to come true did little to hurt Cayce’s growing reputation. A biography was published in 1942, followed by a feature in a major national magazine in 1943 that was titled “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach.” He was at the height of his prominence when he collapsed in August 1944 and suffered a stroke one month later. He died on January 3, 1945, at age 67. Gertrude died just three months later at age 65.
When their son Hugh Lynn Cayce returned to the U.S. later that year after serving in World War II, he took over the leadership of the A.R.E., and was succeeded by his son Charles Thomas Cayce in 1977. This marked the beginning of a surge in popularity for the A.R.E., due in large part to the strength of the New Age movement in the 1980s. A one-time direct mail campaign pushed membership above 100,000 for the first time. In 1985, the A.R.E. reopened Atlantic University, a Cayce-chartered school that had operated for just one year in 1930, as a graduate school focused on transpersonal studies. Atlantic University is today accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission.
Membership began to decline in the 1990s as general interest in the New Age waned. By 2000, there were just over 21,000 active members. A rift arose in 2001 when former leaders sued over an alleged effort to move the A.R.E. to a Christian fundamentalist perspective. The membership was also divided over whether the A.R.E. should focus mainly on holistic medicine or on psychic research.
Kevin Todeschi, the former editor of the A.R.E. magazine, succeeded Charles Thomas Cayce in 2007. In 2021, the A.R.E. faced several lawsuits alleging sexual assault and sexual harassment at its Virginia summer camp. The lawsuits claimed that the A.R.E. had fostered a culture that permitted such behavior, and Todeschi retired. In 2022, Nicole Charles, an ordained interfaith minister, became the A.R.E.’s first female CEO.
Key Sources:
Bro, H. H. (2011). Edgar Cayce, a seer out of season: The Life of History’s Greatest Psychic. ARE Press.
Colton, M. (1997, December 30). Prophet Center: In Virginia Beach, Edgar Cayce’s Followers Meet To Meditate With One Eye on the Calendar. The Washington Post.
Duncan, A. W. (2015). Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment: “Nones” and Religious Experience in the Twenty-first Century. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.
Johnson, K. P. (1998). Edgar Cayce in context: The Readings: Truth and Fiction. SUNY Press.
Kirkpatrick, S. D. (2001). Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet. Penguin.
Lascara, V. (2014, September 5). Edgar Cayce’s message of hope, health and healing lives after him. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.
Lavoie, D. (2021, April 28). Eight women allege sexual abuse at Virginia summer camp. The Associated Press.
McGlone, T. (2001, July 5). Unforeseen troubles strike the A.R.E. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.
Melton, J. G. (1994). Edgar Cayce and Reincarnation: Past Life Readings as Religious Symbology. Syzygy: Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture.
Todeschi, K. J. (1998). Edgar Cayce on The Akashic Records. ARE Press.
Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religious Movements 