Mediums Rare (12 page)

The headaches had been plaguing him for weeks now. By the time he reached Elkton, the pain had become severe and constant.

Edgar couldn’t find the strength to sell anymore. Locating the nearest doctor, he visited the man’s office and asked for a sedative.

The doctor gave him some powder in a folded square of paper and, as soon as he arrived at his hotel, Edgar poured the powder into several inches of tap water, stirred it with an index finger and swallowed it in one gulp. Then he lay down on the bed to try and sleep.

It was March, 1900.

When he opened his eyes again, two doctors were leaning over him, looking very grave.

“How do you feel?” one of them asked.

Edgar tried to answer but was unable to summon more than a whisper.

Shocked, he tried again; in vain. He looked at the doctors frightenedly.

Then he looked around, experiencing a jolt of new dismay.

He was no longer in the hotel room but in his bedroom at home.

He had no recollection whatever of being taken there.

His voice had never returned.

In the ensuing year, Edgar, unable to speak above a painful whisper, had been forced to give up being a salesman and became, instead, a photographer’s apprentice.

In an attempt to regain his voice, he had been working with a local hypnotist named Al Layne. But every time he’d reached a certain level of hypnosis, something had held him back.

Until the afternoon of March 31, 1901.

Edgar was in the parlor of his home, lying on a horsehair sofa, eyes shut. Sitting in a chair beside the sofa was Al Layne.

Across the room, Edgar’s wife Gertrude was sitting with his parents, all observing worriedly.

After yet another attempt to get him to speak normally proved fruitless, Al Layne told them that he was going to try something different.

“Edgar,” he said, “instead of trying to speak,
look inside your throat
and see if you can find out what the problem is.

“Take your time. Look carefully inside your throat and, when you’re ready, tell us what you see. And tell us in a normal tone of voice.”

Edgar Cayce remained motionless on the sofa, eyes closed. His wife and parents stared at him in concern.

Several minutes passed in silence.

Then Edgar began to speak to himself. They all leaned forward in their chairs, straining to hear, but could make no sense of what he was mumbling.

Finally, he cleared his throat.

“Yes,” he said, “we have the body.”

They all stared at him in mute astonishment as he continued, his tone so clear that it was difficult to believe that, moments earlier, it had been no better than a barely audible, rasping sound.

“In the normal state,” said Edgar Cayce, twenty-three, “this body is unable to speak due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect.

“This may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”

Al Layne’s mouth hung open. It did not occur to him for close to a minute that he needed to respond to the young man.

Abruptly, then, he said, “The circulation to the affected parts will now increase and the condition will be removed.”

Edgar reached up to unbutton his shirt. Al Layne started, then leaned forward quickly to open the shirt, baring the young man’s chest.

He caught his breath.

The upper part of Edgar’s chest was turning pink, the color slowly spreading upward to his neck.

“My God.” Squire Cayce was on his feet now, staring at his son with an awestruck expression.

Now his wife stood up beside him, then Gertrude Cayce. With the hypnotist, they watched incredulously as the pinkness on Edgar’s chest turned to a roselike color, then increased to a vivid, burning red, Gertrude and his mother wincing at the sight.

For twenty minutes, Edgar Cayce’s wife and parents stood in silence, gaping at Edgar’s neck and chest.

They twitched in surprise as the young man cleared his throat.

“It’s all right now,” he said, his voice still normal. “The condition is removed. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal and that, after that, the body awaken.”

Layne swallowed dryly and did as he was told and they saw the fierce redness fade through rose and pink, back to normal flesh tone.

Edgar Cayce opened his eyes and sat up. Removing a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he coughed into it and the four people saw a small amount of blood soak into the white cotton.

Then he looked at Al Layne.
“Hello,”
he said.

A smile of overwhelming joy pulled back his lips. “I can talk!” he cried. “I’m all right!”

His wife and mother, weeping, ran to embrace and kiss him. Squire Cayce, speechless with emotion, moved to his son’s side and grasped his hand.

Al Layne could only stare.

In all his years of working with hypnosis, he had never seen the like.

So began the healing life of Edgar Cayce, the most incredible psychic of our century.

For more than forty years, this simple Kentucky man, with no medical training whatsoever, or much education of any kind, diagnosed the nature of every patient’s ailment—
many of them hundreds of miles distant
—and recommended treatment.

Edgar Cayce healed literally
thousands
of men, women and children—of appendicitis—arthritis—tuberculosis—intestinal fever—hypertension—hay fever—polio-diabetes—and hundreds of other illnesses and injuries.

In all, Cayce gave 14,256 psychic readings yielding 145,135 transcript pages over a period of 43 years.

Not once did he contradict himself.

In addition to his physical readings, Cayce also gave psychic readings in which he discussed the history of Man on Earth.

Through these readings, he was able to predict accurately a number of archaeological discoveries decades before they were made, regarding not only known civilizations but lost civilizations as well, the existence of which had not been uncovered when the predictions were made.

Describing this pre-historic world, he spoke about the extreme northern portions—the polar regions—as existing in the southern portions—the tropical regions; the Nile emptying into the Atlantic; the Sahara fertile and inhabited; the Mississippi Basin under miles of ocean, the only visible area of what is now the United States being portions of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

The Atlantic Ocean, he claimed, was mostly the continent of Atlantis.

The Pacific Ocean, he claimed, was mostly the continent of Lemuria.

Regarding Cayce’s amazing record of healings—especially those at great distances—it has been questioned as to whom he was referring when he used the word “we” while diagnosing and prescribing cures for illnesses.

Was it the so-called “editorial we”?

Or did “we,” in fact, refer to the so-called “spirit doctors” who were ostensibly conferring with him?

This interpretation seems the most acceptable.

The alternative is that he utilized some incredibly complicated telepathic and/or clairvoyant hook-up to the brains of hundreds of living doctors and the—often remote—locations of hundreds of exotic balms and medications.

Psychical research—now formally given the name of Parapsychology is, today, part of the curriculum at major colleges and universities.

Harvard. Yale. Columbia. Duke. Cambridge. Oxford.

While not given the extensive respect it received at the turn of the century, psychical research has, nonetheless, achieved a plateau of genuine acceptance by part of the scientific world.

Part of this acceptance is due to the laborious work of one man at Duke University: J. B. Rhine

For the first time in the history of psychical research, telepathy was studied by serious investigators as the primary aspect of psychic ability.

This was a calculated extension of earlier tests which discovered that patients, in mesmeric trances, often responded to unspoken thoughts.

Tests were given by Janet and Gurney establishing the correct ident
ification of pain by telepathy.

Often, when the hypnotist pinched himself (or herself) the subject “felt” the pain.

Experiments were conducted by Professor and Mrs. Henry Sidgwic in which two-digit numbers selected at random and “visualized” by the hypnotist, were transferred telepathically to entranced subjects in adjoining rooms.

A vital aspect of these experiments was the adoption of mathematical evaluation of the test results.