Edgar Cayce (18 March 1877–3 January 1945), founder of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Incorporated, was born in the town of Beverly, in Christian County, Kentucky, and was the son of Leslie Burr Cayce, a failed farmer then operating a dry-goods store, and Carrie Elizabeth Major Cayce. Reared in the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), Cayce became sexton of Liberty Church in Beverly at age ten and was baptized in 1888. About two years later while in bed at home he had a vision of an angelic being, after which he began to exhibit evidence of a photographic memory, an ability to retain large volumes of printed information. About 1892 after a baseball struck him in the spine, he appeared to enter a trance state in which he diagnosed his injury and prescribed a poultice treatment.

At age fifteen Cayce left school after completing the eighth grade. He worked on an uncle's farm before returning to his family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where he took jobs as a bookstore clerk and as a shoe salesman. In 1898 Cayce moved to Louisville to work for a book and stationery business and then joined his father as a traveling insurance salesman. In 1900 Cayce lost his voice for about a year. Unable to continue selling insurance, he found a job with a photographic studio. The following year a Hopkinsville hypnotist, Al Layne, placed him in a trance, during which Cayce diagnosed his malady and prescribed a treatment, and he then regained the use of his voice. Cayce periodically lost his voice thereafter, but he was always able to regain it after entering a trance. Until 1903, when the medical board required him to stop, Layne used Cayce as a medical clairvoyant when treating other patients.

In 1902 Cayce moved to Bowling Green, where he worked in a bookstore. After a six-year engagement, he married Gertrude Evans, of Hopkinsville, on 17 June 1903. They had three sons, one of whom died in infancy. Cayce opened a photographic studio in 1904 but continued to explore medical clairvoyance with several Bowling Green physicians. In June 1909 he moved to Alabama, where for a time he operated photographic studios in several small cities. On a return visit to Hopkinsville, he met Wesley Harrington Ketchum, a homeopath in practice there. Ketchum tested Cayce's ability at clairvoyant diagnosis and was sufficiently impressed to report the results to a Boston medical conference. The New York Times picked up the story and on 9 October 1910 published an article headlined "Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized." The story was reprinted in many of the nation's newspapers and gave Cayce his first national fame. Cayce moved back to Hopkinsville and from then until 1912 ran a photographic studio while also serving in partnership with Ketchum and another man as a psychic diagnostician.

Early in 1912 Cayce returned to Alabama and set up the photographic Cayce Art Company in Selma. He eventually resumed giving psychic readings. Between 1919 and 1923 he spent much of his time in Texas. With several partners he founded the Cayce Petroleum Company in hopes of raising enough money to build a hospital, but his use of trances in oil prospecting was unsuccessful. Within two years he had begun a national lecture tour giving psychic demonstrations for the public. In September 1923 he hired Gladys Davis as his secretary, and she recorded the results of virtually all of his reading sessions for the next twenty-one years. In 1923 Arthur Lammers, a publisher in Dayton, Ohio, met Cayce and helped focus his trance readings on such subjects as Atlantis, the Great White Brotherhood, and reincarnation. Cayce moved his family to Dayton, but the partnership soon faltered.

Morton Harry Blumenthal, a young and successful New York financier, met Cayce about that time and for several years provided financial support. In September 1925 Cayce moved his family and residence to Virginia Beach, where he and Blumenthal in May 1927 jointly established the Association of National Investigators, Incorporated, a company organized to promote psychic and scientific research, with Blumenthal as president and Cayce as secretary-treasurer. In February 1929 the two men opened the Cayce Hospital to provide medical care for patients under the direction of Cayce's psychic readings. The ANI chartered Atlantic University in May 1930, with William Moseley Brown, a former professor of education and psychology at Washington and Lee University and Republican candidate for governor, as first president. The association also launched a magazine, The New To-Morrow, but the Great Depression and conflicts among Cayce's financial supporters led in 1931 to the closing of the Cayce Hospital, the dissolution of the association, and the bankruptcy of the university.

Cayce and his remaining supporters reorganized as the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Incorporated, in the summer of 1931 to support continuation of his work. They also created affiliated local study groups that used his readings for spiritual development. In November of that year Cayce and his wife and secretary were arrested in New York on a fortune-telling charge, but the judge dismissed the case because he declined to interfere with the beliefs of an incorporated ecclesiastical body. Cayce, along with his wife, elder son, and secretary, was arrested in Detroit in 1935 after a medical reading. Convicted of practicing medicine without a license, Cayce received probation with no fine or jail sentence.

During the next decade Cayce finally enjoyed financial stability. The growth of the ARE made it necessary to add an office, library, and fireproof vault to the Cayce residence in 1940, and two years later Norfolk Study Group Number 1 published A Search for God, based on group readings and years of applying the readings' lessons. In December 1942 Thomas Sugrue published a highly sympathetic biography, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, to wide acclaim, which also produced a huge demand for readings. An article calling Cayce the "Miracle Man of Virginia Beach" appeared in the popular magazine Coronet in September 1943 and further increased Cayce's workload.

Cayce published very little during his life beyond several articles for ARE publications. A twenty-four-volume edition of most of his readings was published in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the 1990s a new edition with related correspondence appeared in CD-ROM format. The ARE Press also issued a popular paperback series of studies of different aspects of the readings. Three autobiographical accounts dating from the 1920s and 1930s appeared in 1997 under the title The Lost Memoirs of Edgar Cayce: Life as a Seer (reprinted in 1999 as My Life as a Seer: The Lost Memoirs).

During much of his residency in Virginia Beach, Cayce was a member of the Presbyterian Church, in which he taught Sunday school for many years, but his trance readings conveyed a synthesis of Theosophy, New Thought, and Protestant theology. Although medical readings retained primacy, many seekers obtained readings for dream interpretation, personal guidance, prophecy, and past-life information. The last included elaborate details about Atlantis, ancient Egypt, and early Christianity. Late in the twentieth century some of those readings became important foundation texts in the New Age movement.

Despite being warned by the readings themselves that he could undertake no more than five readings each day without serious risk to his health, Cayce yielded to public demand, exacerbated by wartime worries, and in 1943 increased his workload dramatically. Suffering from poor health, he recuperated in Roanoke, where he suffered a stroke in September 1944. Edgar Cayce returned to Virginia Beach in November and died on 3 January 1945, less than three months before his wife died of cancer. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

His sons Hugh Lynn Cayce, who became president of the ARE, and Edgar Evans Cayce, together with other staff members, ensured that the association survived and thrived. Its worldwide membership stood at about 30,000 by the end of the twentieth century, when New Age thinking increased interest in the psychic phenomena that made Cayce nationally famous during his lifetime and even more famous and influential thereafter.

Sources Consulted:
The Lost Memoirs of Edgar Cayce: Life as a Seer, ed. A. Robert Smith (1997), with several portraits; biographies include Thomas Sugrue, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, rev. ed. (1945), Harmon Hartzell Bro, A Seer Out of Season: The Life of Edgar Cayce (1989), and Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet (2000); K. Paul Johnson, Edgar Cayce in Context: The Readings: Truth and Fiction (1998); Edgar Cayce Papers, including more than 14,000 original readings, in Edgar Cayce Foundation Archives, Virginia Beach; State Corporate Commission Charter Book, 143:71–73, 163:552–554, Record Group 112, Library of Virginia; obituaries in New York Times, Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, all 4 Jan. 1945, and Washington Post, 5 Jan. 1945.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by K. Paul Johnson.

How to cite this page:
K. Paul Johnson, "Edgar Cayce (1877–1945)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cayce_Edgar, accessed [today's date]).

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