Hugh Lynn Cayce (16 March 1907–4 July 1982), business manager and president of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Incorporated, was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and was the son of Edgar Cayce and Gertrude Evans Cayce. Soon after his birth the family moved to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and in 1912 to Selma, Alabama. The accidental explosion of some photographic flash powder during a practical joke damaged Cayce's eyes when he was about six years old and rendered him temporarily blind. He attributed his recovery to treatment his father prescribed while in a trance. From 1919 to 1923, while his father spent much of his time in Texas promoting a petroleum business and then began a national lecture tour, Cayce lived in Hopkinsville with his mother and younger brother. Later the family rejoined Edgar Cayce in Dayton, Ohio, and finally in the autumn of 1925 moved to Virginia Beach, where the senior Cayce and a financial supporter established the Association of National Investigators, Incorporated, in May 1927 to encourage research on psychic phenomena. Hugh Cayce attended public schools in Selma and Hopkinsville and in 1925 completed high school at a private school in Dayton. He attended a Norfolk business school for one year before entering Washington and Lee University, from which he graduated in 1930 with a B.A. cum laude in psychology.

In December 1929, while still in college, Cayce and his friend Thomas Sugrue began editing the Association of National Investigators' quarterly journal The New To-Morrow, to which Cayce also contributed articles. After graduating he returned to Virginia Beach to work with his father, who with a supporter had opened a hospital that offered patients unconventional treatments and remedies following clairvoyant diagnoses, or readings, that Edgar Cayce made while in a trance. Hugh Cayce served as librarian at the short-lived Atlantic University, which the ANI chartered in May 1930 and of which William Moseley Brown, his former psychology professor at Washington and Lee, was president.

After the effects of the Great Depression and conflicts between the senior Cayce and some of his financial supporters closed the ANI, the hospital, and the university, the Cayces organized the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Incorporated, in the summer of 1931, with Hugh Cayce as one of the original board members and business manager. Cayce, along with his parents and his father's secretary, was arrested in Detroit in 1935 after a medical reading. His father was convicted of practicing medicine without a license and placed on probation, but Cayce went free. For thirteen weeks in 1938 he moderated Mysteries of the Mind, a national radio program originating in New York over the Mutual Broadcasting System, in which guest experts discussed episodes of psychic phenomena dramatized in skits. Cayce became recreation director for Virginia Beach in May 1941 and later that year secretary of the new Virginia Beach Defense Service Committee, a group providing recreation for the military personnel flooding the area. On 10 October 1941 he married Sally Gregory Taylor at her family home in Stovall, Granville County, North Carolina. They had two sons. Drafted into the army in the spring of 1943, Cayce served with the 30th Special Service Company, a unit that booked entertainment and provided recreation for the troops, and was in Europe when his father died on 3 January 1945.

Honorably discharged as a sergeant on 12 November 1945, Cayce returned to Virginia Beach to continue his father's work and took charge of the Association for Research and Enlightenment. For more than thirty years he wrote, lectured both nationally and internationally, and held conferences that transformed the ARE into an influential forum for a national spiritual movement. He advocated meditation, dream interpretation, and spiritual study in small groups as safe gateways to greater spiritual awareness. Cayce's book Venture Inward (1964) included a skeptical section on hallucinogenic drugs under the heading, "Dangerous Doorways to the Unconscious." The Virginia Beach Junior Chamber of Commerce, in naming him First Citizen of Virginia Beach in 1964, cited this book and his work with young people. Cayce was a scoutmaster in Virginia Beach for more than twenty years and in 1958 received the Silver Beaver Award from the Boy Scouts of America Tidewater Council for distinguished service to youth.

To disseminate his father's philosophy, Cayce and his younger brother Edgar Evans Cayce chartered the Edgar Cayce Foundation in February 1948; built a library to house Edgar Cayce's works; encouraged writers to publish his views on dream interpretation, holistic health, reincarnation, the soul's journey, and other topics; and worked to revive Atlantic University, which reopened with graduate programs in 1985. The brothers described their father's clairvoyant gift and its limitations in The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce's Power (1971). Hugh Cayce edited The Edgar Cayce Reader (1969) and published God's Other Door (1958), a commentary on life after death based on his father's readings; Earth Changes Update (1980), a commentary on Edgar Cayce's predictions of coming events; and Faces of Fear (1980), an explanation of the causes of fear and anxiety in the context of Edgar Cayce's readings. By the time poor health required his retirement as ARE president in 1976 in favor of his son Charles Thomas Taylor Cayce, Cayce had expanded the association into a headquarters for spiritual enlightenment with centers worldwide. Hugh Lynn Cayce chaired the ARE governing board until his death from cancer in Virginia Beach on 4 July 1982. His body was donated to the University of Virginia Hospital for medical research.

Sources Consulted:
A. Robert Smith, Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father's Business (1988), including several portraits; much information in biographies of Edgar Cayce, especially Thomas Sugrue, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, rev. ed. (1945), and Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet (2000); Hugh Lynn Cayce interviews and correspondence in Edgar Cayce Foundation Archives and ARE Library, Virginia Beach; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 14 Oct. 1941; State Corporate Commission Charter Book, 223:349–351, Record Group 112, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Norfolk Ledger-Star and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, both 5 July 1982 (portraits).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by A. Robert Smith.

How to cite this page:
A. Robert Smith, "Hugh Lynn Cayce (1907–1982)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cayce_Hugh_Lynn, accessed [today's date]).

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