Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 20

Young Cayce’s first major job in Hopkinsville was at the Hopper Bookstore, a general-interest establishment and not, as skeptics would subsequently assert, an occult-oriented business. His experience there would mark the beginning of his opening to the wider world, though Cayce would remain at heart a provincial country boy whose worldview, if not one congenial to Southern fundamentalists, and literary tastes were unshakably Bible-centered.

For a few months Cayce and his father entered into a partnership selling insurance. The 23-year-old Cayce did well at his new job until he began to suffer from debilitating headaches. On April 18, 1900, on a business trip to Elkton, 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Hopkinsville, he sought relief from a local physician. The doctor prescribed a white powder which Cayce was to mix in water and swallow. The young man returned to his hotel room and did just that—with disastrous consequences.

The next thing he knew, he was in bed in the Cayce family home. A family friend had found him, behaving oddly, at the Elkton train station and accompanied him on the trip to Hopkinsville. Cayce had no memory of this, and besides the amnesia, he was nearly without voice, able to speak in no more than a whisper. At first assumed to be temporary, the condition continued, even worsened, in the weeks and months ahead as physicians, family members, and his fiancée, Gertrude Evans, looked on despairingly.

Unable to work as an insurance salesman any longer, Cayce took a job as an apprentice in a photography studio, to learn skills that would serve him well in his later professional life. When a stage hypnotist passed through town, friends urged Cayce to see if the man—Stanley “The Laugh King” Hart—might be able to cure him of his ailment. Remarkably, when Hart hypnotized Cayce, the young man spoke in a normal voice. When out of hypnosis, however, he relapsed back into the whisper. Even with posthypnotic suggestion, the laryngitis stubbornly persisted.

Though others tried to help Cayce, things got only worse. Even brief, whispered speech grew steadily more painful. Then in the winter of 1901 Al Layne, a Hopkinsville man with a mail-order degree in osteopathy and an involvement in hypnotism, began treating him. As before, the hypnotized Cayce spoke without impediment. Again, however, posthypnotic suggestion had no effect. Then a medical consultant offered the provocative suggestion that Layne should address Cayce’s unconscious mind directly and ask it to diagnose the affliction.

The experiment was conducted at the Cayce residence on the afternoon of March 31, with Leslie and Carrie looking on (and Edgar’s sisters Annie and Mary sneaking a view through the keyhole). Layne put Edgar into a hypnotic state and said, “You are now asleep and will be able to tell us what we want to know. You have before you the body of Edgar Cayce. Describe his condition and tell us what is wrong.” After a few moments of inaudible mumbling Cayce’s voice came through clearly: “Yes. We can see the body.”

Referring to Cayce in the third person, the voice went on to characterize the vocal problems as of psychological origin. “Nerve strain” had paralyzed some of the vocal muscles. The problem could be cured through hypnotic suggestion that blood circulate through the affected area. As soon as Layne spoke the words, the voice replied that the circulation was starting to flow. Layne and the Cayces could see the neck and chest turn pink as the blood proceeded to flow so vigorously that Leslie loosened the collar to help its movement. Twenty minutes into the treatment, Cayce’s voice declared, “The vocal chords are perfectly normal now. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal, and that after that the body awaken.”

Once awake, Cayce spat into his handkerchief and soaked it with blood. Then he said, “Hello. Hey, I can talk.”

He would suffer relapses about once a month for the next year, but each time they responded to the sort of treatment he underwent on March 31. Layne remarked that if Cayce could diagnose himself, he surely could do so for others, and he volunteered himself as the first test subject. In trance Cayce told Layne how to treat a persistent gastrointestinal inflammation with exercise and meditation. On awakening, Cayce had no memory of anything, and Layne had to show him his notes. He was subsequently cured.

Cayce’s followers would think of his unconscious self as “The Source,” which referred to itself in the first person plural and as separate from Cayce himself.

Thus was Cayce’s career as psychic healer launched. At first those who approached him were confined to family members and local friends, but as time went by, Cayce’s fame spread, and soon requests for treatment were arriving in the mail from strangers who had read about his gifts in newspaper articles. Cayce found that he could conduct readings at a distance with persons he had not met or would ever meet. He asked only for voluntary donations and never got rich from his apparent clairvoyance, even when he tried to use it in business ventures, notably in Texas oil fields in the 1920s. As always, he had no conscious memory of what he spoke while entranced.

Cayce’s followers would think of his unconscious self as “The Source,” which referred to itself in the first person plural and as separate from Cayce himself. In later years alleged discarnates manifested through Cayce in the fashion of a more conventional spirit medium. Most spectacularly, a loud, haughty entity claiming to be the Archangel Michael appeared from time to time.

The stories told of Cayce’s seemingly miraculous gifts remain, of course, contentious. Skeptics reject them, unsurprisingly, as inherently impossible, insisting that they amount to no more than anecdotes, regardless of apparent documentation. Only the most extreme critics, however, have judged Cayce anything other than honorably intentioned. He did not get rich from the exploitation of his talents. Numerous individuals swore that he healed them, and it is surely futile to quarrel with their assessments of their own health status. All that can be said with reasonable certainty, perhaps, is that our understanding of the world in some areas is far from firm, that personalities and abilities like Cayce’s exist at the fringes of knowledge, and that at this stage conclusions about them ought not to be reached dogmatically.

Cayce died on January 3, 1945, but his work continues in the Virginia Beach-based Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), founded in 1931. A small library of books, including several comprehensive biographies (the first published in 1943, the latest in 2000), examines Cayce’s life, teachings, and related subjects.