Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 18

Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” was born on March 18, 1877, near Beverly, in Christian County in southwestern Kentucky, a few miles from the Tennessee border. He was the son of Leslie Cayce—also called “The Squire,” he was a small landowner and sometime justice of the peace—and his wife, Carrie. Besides Edgar, the Cayces had four daughters. Two others, a boy and a girl, died in infancy.

From a very early age, Cayce was not quite like anybody else. When young Edgar—”Eddy” then—was four, a freak accident killed his beloved grandfather Tom Cayce as the two were out riding horses. Soon, while living temporarily with an aunt and uncle as his parents cared for Tom’s widow, Eddy claimed to hold regular conversations there with his grandfather.

In life, according to family tradition, Tom possessed remarkable psychic powers. In death, according to his grandson, he resumed his old habit of watching over farmhands as they hung tobacco to dry in the barn. Though the workers were unaware of his presence and his directions to them now were only—if that—intuitively grasped, Eddy related, he was able to perceive his grandfather’s apparitional form in beams of sunlight that shone through cracks between the ceiling rafters. Cayce biographers allege that the boy unnerved relatives when he related obscure, closely held family-history matters which he insisted his grandfather had imparted in their conversations in the barn. His devout relatives feared that he was under the devil’s influence.