Remembrances of Early Days - Edgar Evans Cayce

Edgar Evans Cayce is the youngest son of Edgar and Gertrude Cayce. He was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1918 and moved with his family to Virginia Beach in September 1925.

Following advice given to him in a reading from his father, he entered Duke University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1939. In 1940 he became an engineer for Virginia Electric and Power Company (now Dominion).

Serving four-and-a-half years during World War II, he attained the rank of captain in the air force. He returned to the power company in 1945, from which he retired in 1983.

He married Kathryn A. Bane in 1942, and they have two children. Currently he serves as a trustee emeritus on the A.R.E. Board of Trustees. An avid golfer and storyteller, he is also the author or co-author of four books: Humor from the Psychic, The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce's Power, The Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited, and Edgar Cayce on Atlantis, which has sold over one million copies and has been translated into a dozen different languages.

Edgar Evans's high school photo, 1934

Q. Kevin Todeschi: Edgar Evans, this year marks A.R.E.'s 75th anniversary. Interestingly enough, it's also the 50th anniversary of buying back the old Edgar Cayce Hospital building that had been lost during the Depression.

A. Edgar Evans Cayce: I can remember both events. When A.R.E. was formed I was 13 years old. I was 38 when the hospital was bought back.

The Association of National Investigators had been the organization that preceded A.R.E. When the hospital closed its doors, my dad, Edgar Cayce, was really at a low point in his life. The hospital had been his dream. Prior to the hospital closing, the medical director, Dr. House, who was also Dad's friend, died as well. I think that Dad felt like everything he had hoped for had suddenly gone down the drain.

After the hospital closed, I remember Dad telling me that the building would never be a success at anything but what it had been intended for - and he was right. Over time, some of the best businessmen at the Beach acquired the property. They tried to make it a motel. They tried to make it a nightclub. Over a period of years, they tried to make it half a dozen things. Eventually, the "North End" of Virginia Beach started to boom. The Ramada got built there on 57th Street. Everything on the beach was booming, but nobody could do a thing with the old hospital. Finally, when it came up for sale, many A.R.E. people and study groups came together to help buy it back for about $100,000. Now keep in mind the A.R.E. didn't have enough money to pay the interest on the loan, but somehow we got it back, and it's been a success ever since. Dad was right about it succeeding for what it was intended.

What I remember most about the time after the hospital closed was that we had to move two or three times. For a time we even lived right across the street from the old hospital, which I'm sure was really hard on Dad. Eventually we moved down to Arctic Circle by the lake and rented two little tiny houses. My folks had to get two of them to have an office, as well as a place for the family and a place for Gladys Davis. We lived Association headquarters and Dad lived there until he died.

Gladys was just like a member of the family. And she had a memory like a computer. She could remember people's names and when they had readings. She'd remember their readings, when they'd written, what had been in their letters, and so forth. She also remembered Dad's letters because she had seen the letters that had been written back and forth. Dad wrote a lot of letters. He had an old Remington typewriter and he had literally worn some of the lettering off the keys. Gladys could remember so many things about people because she was there when the people were there, when the readings were taking place. She was amazing.

Q. Can you describe how Virginia Beach has changed since you first moved here?

A. (Laughing) When we first came here, I don't think there were six houses between 31st Street and the end of the North End. Laskin Road hadn't been built. All that existed were sand dunes between here and Cape Henry. We used to go up there and pick grapes - great big things that Dad used to make jelly and wine. You could pick them by the bushel.

Virginia Beach was just a tiny little fishing village then. Virginia Beach hadn't incorporated Princess Anne yet; it was just a strip of land along the oceanfront. I remember there used to be a company at the oceanfront called Storemont's Fishing Company. They used to have these long wooden poles up with nets between them to catch fish. Sometimes during a storm those poles would break off and drift ashore. We were so poor that Hugh Lynn and I used to gather up those broken pieces of wood and saw them up for firewood for the fireplace. They burned real pretty because they were full of the ocean salts. Some of them would be green, red, blue, all colors. We sawed many a cord of wood from the oceanfront.

Speaking of old Virginia Beach, there used to be a train track that ran along Pacific Avenue. A lot of the railroad people used to come down here. They'd take a Pullman car down to the beach and park where the Cavalier Hotel is now. The train used to bring picnickers from Norfolk down to the old casino that was quite popular. The casino used to have a picnic pavilion with tables and chairs where people could eat lunch. It also had a bathhouse with showers and changing rooms for swimmers. There was a dance floor where famous bands played at night. There were areas for slot machines, and, though gambling was illegal, the city looked the other way. The Beach also had a theater. It was 10 cents to go see a movie, but nobody had 10 cents in those days.

Virginia Beach started annexing property and eventually merged with Princess Anne County in 1961 - that's when the city really started to grow. Virginia Beach is now the largest city in the state, with about a half million people.

Q. What was it like having a psychic for a father?

A. To tell you the truth, when I was real little, I used to think that everybody's father gave readings. I didn't know the difference. Growing up with it is different than coming into it from the outside because I used to watch him give readings and when I got older I had readings myself. Over the years, I saw the readings work for many, many people, including my mother, my father, my brother, and myself. I had physical readings and life readings. As I grew up, I learned not to talk about it at school. Most of the people at the Beach thought Dad was a doctor of some kind. They used to call him "Doc Cayce." When he'd take me into the barbershop to get a haircut when I was little, they'd say, "How ya doing, Doc?"

One time during a reading I asked where I should go to college, and it suggested Duke. It suggested engineering and stated that I could get a scholarship. I graduated from Oceana High School with 28 people in the graduating class, and getting a scholarship to Duke seemed like the chance of a snowball in hell. (Laughs) Well, I put in for a scholarship and got a scholarship for my first year. I was valedictorian of the Oceana graduating class, but still it was a small, small school.

Q. When you were thinking about getting married, did you ask for advice?

A. My girlfriend Kathryn ("Kat") had a reading. She always kids me about it and says that if Dad hadn't recommended marriage, we wouldn't have gotten married. Dad said that we'd been associated before - this year, we'll have been married 63 years!

Q. One of the subjects that you really took an interest in was the readings on Atlantis. How did that happen?

A. That really came about in the early 1960s. I was skeptical like anybody would have been because most people thought Atlantis was a myth. I decided to read every reading on Atlantis and see if I could find anything that might prove it. I thought I would go down to A.R.E. at night and read all the readings that mentioned Atlantis. I figured the project would take me a few weeks. At the time, all of the readings were on microfilm that could be viewed through one of those roller-type machines. There was no index system yet, so I had to scroll through all of the life readings. The project I had thought would take a month took me over a year. I worked for two or three nights a week, maybe two or three hours a night, and finally read through every one.

As I read the readings on Atlantis, I'd make notes and then I tried to organize them into time periods and subjects. Dad didn't often give dates, unless somebody asked him. But a few were mentioned, so I tried to group the readings into one of the three destructions he spoke about: one occurring around 50,000 B.C., when the first part of Atlantis was submerged; another occurring about 28,000 B.C., when they had the second destruction and the continent was split into islands; and the last one about 10,000 B.C., when the last islands went down. The final destruction is the one that Plato talked about.

Dad made statements in some of these Atlantis readings that later proved to be accurate. For example, he was talking about this ray that they had in Atlantis and the technology that they had reached. He said that this would be discovered in 25 years. Well, almost exactly 25 years later, the Bell laboratories discovered the laser. Dad also talked about humankind being in the earth a lot longer than geology and archaeology claimed to be true. Most of the early readings were in the '20s and '30s, at a time when science believed humans had inhabited North America for 2,000-3,000 years at most. Dates of 10,000 or 20,000 years were ridiculous. But we now know that carbon dating suggests humans have been in places like Pennsylvania for at least 17,000 years, I believe South America has a date of at least 35,000 years, and so forth. Over the years, it's turned out that people lived in the places Dad said they had, at the time he said they did. In the past, no one believed that the poles had ever shifted, now there's real good evidence that they've shifted before. They've found mammals in Siberia that are frozen with tropical vegetation in their stomachs. And all the things that he said about the past - all the recent discoveries, instead of proving him wrong have proven him accurate.

Q. Didn't you and your brother Hugh Lynn write a book once about the times when Edgar Cayce might not have been completely accurate?

A. It's called The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce's Power. The two of us wanted to look at those occasions when the readings seemed to have been wrong. In all, perhaps 200 out of the 14,000 could have been somewhat inaccurate - now that's still a pretty good batting average. It gives him about a 98 or 99 percent accuracy rate. In the end, I came to the conclusion that there were explainable reasons why some of these readings were wrong.

You see, overall there are probably four sources of psychic information evidenced in the Cayce files. One of them, of course, is the unconscious memory of everything you ever read or heard that's in your mind, although you may not remember it. It's for this reason, I think, that many of the readings have a biblical sound with the "thee's" and "thou's" scattered throughout. Dad read the Bible through once for every year of his life.

A second source of psychic information is telepathy - a communication between one mind and another. If you could get into a person's subconscious mind, like Dad could, you could give a beautiful diagnosis of his or her physical body. That would be the second source.

The third source is clairvoyance - the capability of somehow "seeing" things at a distance. Now whether he saw things at a distance the same way you and I might if we were there, I don't know. Not in every reading but in a number of readings he would make a side comment like: "What a beautiful cherry tree in the yard!" or "This man's arguing with his wife," or "There's been a wreck outside," and so forth. We always tried to check up on these comments, writing or calling and asking, "Do you have a cherry tree in your yard?" or "Were you arguing with your wife?" or "Do you have a beautiful collie dog?" or something like that. He was never wrong. I never heard of a case when he was wrong.

On one occasion, I was listening to a reading that was supposed to be given for a man in New York. This man was supposed to be in his apartment at the time of the reading. My mother, Gertrude, gave my father the suggestion, "You will have before you the body of so-and-so, who is at this address in New York..." Dad lay there for a minute or two and then said, "He's not here. He's on a bus coming across town. There's been an accident and there's a lot of traffic; the bus is late. He'll be here in minute. We'll wait." He lay there for about 10 or 15 minutes and didn't say a word. Then suddenly he said, "He's come in now," and proceeded to give the reading.

When my Dad said that, Hugh Lynn got up and went in the other room and called the man on the phone. The man said, "That's exactly right. I know I was supposed to be in my apartment at the time. I was on the way and there was a traffic accident. The bus was late. I just walked in." So there's something nobody could've anticipated. I think his clairvoyance is pretty accurate.

The fourth place of getting information would be, well, there's two ways of looking at it. A lot of people think there's such a thing as the Akashic records - a record of everything that ever happened in time and space - and it's kind of like a big library. If you could have access to that, you could have access to any kind of information. Another way of looking at this fourth source is to think about moving in another dimension, like where you take a point, you move it, you have a line - one-dimensional - no height or depth in it. You move the line at right angles to itself and you've got a plane - two dimensions, no height or depth. If you move the plane at right angles to itself, you would have a cube - three dimensions, like the kind of world we live in.

Suppose you could move that cube at right angles to itself? Well, how you do that? We can't conceive of moving that, but suppose you moved it in time so it existed yesterday, today, and tomorrow. As an analogy, think of a little two-dimensional bug that's crawling in this plane, and he has a free will and he has a memory. He remembers where he's been. He knows where he is, but he knows nothing about what's going on up here or where he's going. But you're a three-dimensional person; you're looking down on this plane. You can see that bug and you can see every place he's been. You can see where he is. You can see everything that could possibly happen to him in the future and you can see it all at once - past, present, and future. Now you could say, if you continue to go like you're going, at three o'clock tomorrow you'll be right here - and you'd be right. But since he has a free will he might choose to move in another direction. He might go this way or that way, and you'd be wrong. So that's why I don't think the future is fixed. I think that Dad could see future possibilities, some more likely than others.

In addition to these four sources, I think it's important to keep in mind that the attitudes and the purposes and ideals of the people involved in the readings affected his accuracy. I know for a fact that if Dad had a stomachache or a cold or was upset physically, he didn't get as good a reading as he did when he was perfectly healthy. So that was certainly one thing. On the other hand, if a mother had a sick child that she wanted to get well, Dad certainly wanted to help the child get well. This empathy between them coupled with good intentions, good purposes, would result in a good reading. But if somebody was looking for a goldmine or buried treasure, what's the intention or motive? Dad felt he ought to help people. I don't know whether finding a goldmine would help them - might or might not. All kinds of things went into giving a reading.

Q. What do you think your father would say about how his work has spread all over the world?

A. I think he would be very surprised, but I think he would be very happy about it. My father's hope was to help people as much as he could. He was most interested in helping people. If a person couldn't afford a reading, he'd give it to them for free. He was constantly giving to others. While he was still alive and Tom Sugrue's book There Is a River came out and the Coronet magazine article "Miracle Man of Virginia Beach" by Margueritte Harmon Bro came out at about the same time, he became famous overnight. At the time, Hugh Lynn was in Europe and I was overseas and neither of us could do anything to slow him down. The readings just started piling up. The bags of mail they brought in just buried him. He'd get so many calls at night; he even had to get an unlisted number. People called him up at midnight: "My mother's dying," or "My wife's dying, what can you do?" He was just deluged with people trying to get help.

Although the readings themselves recommended giving no more than two readings a day, he started giving 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 readings a day just to try to help. It was too much, and he had a breakdown from it. He had a minor stroke, and he gave a reading on himself and it told him he was trying to do too much; if he didn't slow down, it would kill him. He didn't slow down and it killed him. That's what's happened.

When I think about it, Dad was happiest when the hospital opened and it was treating all these people. I guess that was his peak. That's what he had wanted most of all. When the hospital folded, it was really a big disappointment.

I remember so many times watching my dad on the fishing pier just thinking and fishing. He loved to fish. He loved to tend to his garden. He never came in from the garden without an armful of vegetables. He never came in from fishing without a load of fish. He was good at both of these things, but he loved helping people.

I think he'd be happy with how many people have been helped by the readings. If Dad were alive today, I think he'd be surprised by all of the books, by the readings on computer, by the Edgar Cayce Centers around the world. Other than being surprised, I guess he'd still be giving readings as much as he could and probably run into the same problems - wanting to help more people than he could. Dad would be surprised at how the organization has grown. He would be surprised at buying the old Cayce Hospital building back and then at the size of the Library and Conference Center. He used to have a little library of books, and now the A.R.E. has more than 65,000 volumes. I think he'd be surprised.

You know, I remember when they built the Library/Conference Center back in 1975. Hugh Lynn was worried about how they were going to move the books from the Cayce Hospital building to their new home in the Library. There were over 16,000 volumes at the time. I suggested that he get together as many staff and volunteers as he could find and have them form a human chain down the steps of the hospital building, across the parking lot, and up the steps into the second floor of the new building. That's exactly what he decided to do. On the day of the move, approximately 200 staff and volunteers formed the chain and were able to move those 16,000 books in one day!

Q. Edgar Evans, in addition to your own readings, the readings on Atlantis, and some of the stories you've remembered here today, do any of the other readings stand out in your mind?

A. Once toward the end of a life reading, an individual asked the question, "Who will aid me most in my work and daily life?" Dad's answer was short and to the point: "God!" - one word.

Q. Thanks for taking the time to be with us today.

A. It's been a pleasure.