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parties, Santa Monica sunshine, and his own stable of movie-star clients. But, as he aged, the astrologer faced deep difficulties, physically and perhaps in other respects. By the early twenty-first century, in his seventies, he had been blinded and paralyzed by multiple sclerosis, diagnosed three decades earlier. His tone coarsened, as he bragged to biographers of once victimizing a weaker schoolmate. Toward the end of his life—possibly in need of funds or just entertaining a late-career thrill—the thinking-man’s astrologer licensed Sydney Omarr’s Horoscope Slot Machine to Las Vegas casinos. “Other business proposals riding on Omarr’s name recognition are in the works,” reported the Los Angeles Times—proposals that included the postmortem production of his books and columns by ghostwriters. It was not the legacy foreseen for the stargazer that Time had once called astrology’s “most skillful and sober public protagonist.” With success came a new temptation to the American occult, or at least to its biggest names: selling out.

* Astrologers strenuously disagreed among themselves about the timing of the zodiacal phenomenon.

† The Kybalion is often misdated to 1912. But the copyright and first edition were actually from 1908. The error arose from a 1940 edition in which the publisher listed the initial registration as 1912, almost certainly in an attempt to reassert control over a copyright that had fallen into public domain after failing to be renewed at the required 28-year interval.

* Case was not alone in airing Golden Dawn philosophy. Israel Regardie, a former secretary to British occultist Aleister Crowley and an accomplished intellect in his own right, published a four-part series of Golden Dawn documents from 1937 to 1940. Regardie’s volumes are broader, though less accessible, than Case’s.

* The edition was published by the present author.

* In 1932, the brotherhood reorganized itself as the Church of Light, seeking legal protection when Los Angeles County passed anti-“fortune-telling” ordinances, similar to those in New York, which curtailed the commercial practice of astrology.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“THE GREATEST MYSTIC WHO EVER LIVED IN AMERICA”

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing.

—1 CORINTHIANS 13:2

He came to Edgar Cayce a broken man—with an ugly past. He had been the business manager for the mystico-fascist order the Silver Shirts, and, though he withheld as much from the psychic, he had also been a Pennsylvania organizer for the Ku Klux Klan. Most recently, he helped build the Mighty I AM movement of Guy and Edna Ballard, the mystical sect marked by prosperity teachings and ultrapatriotism. All seemed to be going his way until the early hours of January 13, 1935, when he stepped from the Ballards’ car while driving from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and was struck by an oncoming vehicle.

Suffering from a broken skull and a shattered left leg, he could no longer work, and the Ballards dropped him. The couple spread the story, he told another ex-follower, “that my accident happened because I wasn’t in the circle of Light with which they had surrounded the car.”

Still in pain and searching for work six years later, the man wrote to Cayce, a reputed miracle worker living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Cayce was said to be able to go into a sleeplike trance and diagnose and prescribe cures for the illnesses of people he never met; he also gave psychic counsel and advice. Between the opening years of the twentieth century and his death on January 3, 1945, Cayce (pronounced casey) delivered more than fourteen thousand documented trance readings. Literally thousands of correspondents, many of whom were diagnosed from long distances away and were known to Cayce only by their names, swore to the effectiveness of the treatments prescribed by a man with no medical training and little schooling. Cayce also performed “life readings” in which he was said to peer