Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 19

At the age of three, he stumbled and fell on a board with a protruding nail, which penetrated his skull and pierced his brain. Fortunately, his father, who saw it happen, was there immediately to remove the nail, and his mother bandaged him after pouring turpentine into the open wound. Eddy recovered soon, at least to appearances, and soon resumed his normal youthful activities. This was not the only occasion in his youth that Cayce would suffer a potential (or actual) brain injury, possibly affording at least a partial explanation of the extraordinary states of altered consciousness and perception that would recur throughout his lifetime.

After suffering a head injury, Edgar Cayce said he could see a variety of spiritual beings, including fairies and sprites (BigStock).

In his fourth year “little folk” became his frequent companions. Cayce would maintain all of his life that they were not imaginary playmates but spirit entities—mostly, the souls of boys and girls, first only seven or eight in number, awaiting reincarnations into their physical bodies—who were there to prepare him for challenges and difficulties that he would encounter in later years. When he moved in with his uncle and aunt, the number of spirit entities multiplied as relatives, including parents, joined them. They were no longer interested in childish pursuits; now they wanted to teach him. The adult Cayce claimed that while the beings were invisible to everybody else, his friend Hallie “Little Annie” Seay, one year older than Eddy, also saw them. They liked her and enjoyed answering her many questions.

Once they encountered a different variety of little folk. One day, they noticed an unmoored boat that had drifted on to the sand along Little River. On impulse they boarded it and sailed it on the water till they came to a tiny island. They climbed out of the boat and proceeded to entertain themselves with their usual pursuits. In short order their supernatural friends joined them.

At one point, Cayce would write in his autobiography, the spirits showed them some smaller entities of varying colors and shapes. He described them as fairies or sprites. They were unfriendly, evincing no interest in human beings in general and children in particular. Cayce’s account accords more closely to the traditional fairies of world folk belief than to the sentimental fairies of popular Victorian children’s literature to which young Eddy would have been exposed. Little Annie, who died of pneumonia in January 1892, never provided an independent account, and Cayce’s claims about her involvement rest solely on his own testimony.

Another defining early experience took place in 1889, after he’d retired to his bedroom after a day spent in good part reading scripture. In the middle of the night, he found himself ascending slightly into the air as a “glorious light as of the rising morning sun seemed to fill the whole room and a figure appeared at the foot of my bed.” Surprised and confused, Eddy could only deduce that it was his mother, but he got no answer when he called out her name. When the figure vanished, he went off to check his mother’s whereabouts. She told him she had not been in his room. On his return the apparition made a second appearance. This time Eddy recognized it, surely not coincidentally, as an angel bearing a noteworthy resemblance to one illustrated in his aunt’s Bible, with which he was well familiar. The angel told him his prayers had been answered, urged him to be faithful and true, and predicted that he would help the sick and afflicted.

Eddy attracted attention in his area for his keen intelligence, eloquent speaking, and remarkable powers of memorization, sometimes so fantastic as to seem clairvoyant (as when he allegedly committed books and documents to memory by sleeping—or even just laying his head for a few moments — on them). Though most who knew him thought of him as good-hearted and friendly, he was seen by some as different and thus—in their fearful judgment—an intolerable presence. The religious thought he had the devil in him, and the more secular diagnosed him as mentally ill. All of this led to trouble from teachers, classmates, and church folk (though Cayce was a Bible-memorizing Christian, if an unconventional one, to the end of his life). Conflict and hostility drove him from school by the eighth grade, and he never returned. From then on, his education would be an autodidact’s, informed by wide if erratic reading as well as by the many and diverse people he would meet in the decades ahead.

One afternoon in November 1892, toward the end of his school career, another pivotal life event occurred. During recess he was playing ball with schoolmates when a baseball struck him in the lower spine. In his sister Annie’s account—she was on the playground at the time—Eddy fell over, then got back on his feet, apparently unhurt. Back in his class, however, he began to behave strangely, speaking up, joking, and insulting others, actions uncharacteristic of Eddy in his normal state. On the way home he jumped in front of cars, rolled in the ditches, and smiled maniacally all the while. When he continued to conduct himself in this unusual fashion at home, his mother angrily ordered him to bed after dinner.

As soon as he lay down, he seemed to enter yet another unusual state. While still apparently fully conscious, he embarked on an odd, rambling discourse, covering a range of subjects. One was a secret illicit relationship between two of the county’s most respected men—something, his father believed, Eddy could not have known about. Once he shouted, “Hooray for Cleveland!,” announcing that Grover Cleveland was winning the Presidential race, as in fact he was, even though news of his victory did not reach the rural district until later. Most significantly, however, Eddy provided specific directions to his parents on how they might cure him of his affliction. They were to gather herbs, corn mush, and other household food items and place them in a poultice to the back of his head. The request, coming from someone who was already making them feel uneasy, so unnerved the Cayces that they refused to comply. More accepting of ostensible psychic communications, Eddy’s grandmother Sarah Cayce, however, moved promptly, and by morning the boy was well.

ROBSON’S ISLAND

The S.S. Jesmond, carrying a cargo of dried fruits, was sailing in the open Atlantic on its way to New Orleans one night in early March 1882. Its captain was the Ireland-born David A. Robson. This much of the story seems undeniably true. It may also be true that while at latitude 26° north and longitude 22° west, Robson and his crew noticed masses of dead fish extending all about them for miles. (Independent accounts from the period and location speak of the same phenomenon, presumably the consequence of natural or artificial water pollution.) The dreary, disturbing sight went on and on as the ship plowed through the darkness. An exhausted Robson went to bed.

What is said to have happened next, reported in the New Orleans Daily Picayune a month later, is—to put it charitably—less certainly true. Nonetheless the tale, playing to people’s fascination with lost lands and civilizations, lives on to this day in alternative-reality literature, sometimes (as in the late Charles Berlitz’s 1984 bestseller, Atlantis: The Eighth Continent) represented as possible evidence of Atlantis. Modern writer William L. Moore observes that the area is “located on exactly the same extensive volcanic fault as the Azores—islands long associated with the Atlantis legends.”

Loud, insistent knocking at his door roused the sleeping Robson the next morning. His second officer excitedly informed him that they were in sight of land, though charts showed nothing there, only 2,000 fathoms of water. After confirming the alert with his own eyes, Robson immediately slowed the ship for fear of collision with reefs. Soundings indicated that the sea bed beneath the Jesmond was only 300 feet (91 meters) deep, as opposed to the 12,000 feet (366 meters) of the charts.

Some distance ahead loomed an uncharted island with smoking peaks. At 10 miles (16 kilometers), with the water growing ever more alarmingly shallow, Robson dropped anchor and boarded a boat that took him, a third officer, and a boarding party to the shore. There was no beach, he found, only an extended, apparently lifeless stretch of land littered with volcanic debris and, in the distance, mountains with ongoing volcanic activity. After landing on the island’s western edge, the men tried to enter the interior, but rocks, boulders, and steam made the going difficult, dangerous, and finally not worth the effort.

Not knowing what else to do, the crew congregated by the shore and considered the options. One man, nervously picking at the ground with his boat hook, unearthed what looked like a flint arrowhead. This naturally generated considerable excitement. Tools were procured from the Jesmond, and frantic digging ensued. In due course the men found two huge stone walls, and between them an entrance. They made their way down into it, walking carefully through the rubble until at length they came to a massive collection of artifacts attesting to the presence of an unknown people who had once lived on or colonized the mysterious island.

It took a day and a half to take the materials off the island and into the mother ship. They included quantities of spears, swords, tools, and vases, sometimes engraved with unrecognizable hieroglyphics-like writing. Most spectacularly, there were the remains of two bodies. One consisted of some bones and a nearly complete skull, and the other was a mummy laid in a stone sarcophagus.

The second evening, the weather turned threatening, and Robson was forced to abandon his plan to continue looting the island of its treasures. The men returned to the ship and sailed off, with Robson expressing the hope that he and his crew would be able to revisit the island on their return trip to England.

On April 1 the ship was safely at harbor in New Orleans. An individual identified as the Daily Picayune shipping reporter interviewed Robson at a seaside tavern. The next day the paper ran a story based on that alleged interview, asserting the claims recounted above.

Like many other newspapers of the period, the Picayune ran dubious and fictional stories as supposed news. Many such yarns were made up in the editorial offices. Stories published on or near April Fool’s Day are particularly suspect. On the first, in fact (or perhaps in fiction), the Picayune noted casually that recently a ship arrived at New York had mentioned “having sighted a new volcanic island” at close to the same location claimed for the Robson discovery. (A New York paper, on the other hand, said nothing of such but focused on the stormy weather the ship and crew had endured in the course of their voyage.) The Picayune “interview,” of course, supposedly occurred on April 1, even if the story ran the next day.

A rival newspaper, the Times-Democrat, remarked briefly on the arrival of the Jesmond at New Orleans on the first and mentioned it several more times over the week the ship remained in port. It also says its passage had been “ordinary.”

Needless to say, the alleged mass of enigmatic archaeological artifacts has proved as elusive as Robson’s island. Or, possibly more to the point, just as nonexistent.

Further Reading

Ellis, Richard. Imagining Atlantis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Moore, William L. “Captain Robson’s Lost Island.” Fate 38, 7 (July 1985): 70–75.

In December 1893 the family moved into Hopkinsville, Christian County’s commercial center and largest town, with a reputation as a wide-open place (nicknamed “Hoptown”) with gunmen, gamblers, and prostitutes prominent among the citizenry. Reluctant to abandon his rural roots—and still troubled by the memory of a murder he had witnessed on the city’s streets when he was visiting as a small child—Eddy moved in with relatives in the country and continued to farm.

Edgar Cayce (Mary Evans Picture Library).

Over the next months vivid dreams featuring mystical figures and symbols haunted his nighttime imagination; in a recurring series of images, a veiled woman led him across landscape and stream. Then one day in June 1894, as he repaired a broken plow in an open field, a wave of warmth and comfort suddenly engulfed him. The last time he had encountered that sensation, the angel appeared to him. A voice then told him, “Leave the farm. Go to your mother. Everything will be all right.” He was in Hopkinsville by evening and never looked back.