Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [113]
“Help the Sick”
Cayce was born on March 18, 1877, in a town called Beverly in Western Kentucky. It was a place that didn’t see its first paved road until 1932. Tobacco was the major crop, and nearly everyone owned farmland or worked for someone who did. Memories of the Civil War ran deep, and the line between blacks and whites was like a razor fence. Although Cayce’s childhood could be harsh—his father was known to drink and sometimes mete out beatings—there was unmistakable closeness and trust in the family. Even when Cayce was well into middle age, his father, Leslie, would address him in letters as “My Dear Sweet Precious Boy.” Outside of home, school, and church, there were few activities or distractions. Even visiting the larger neighboring town of Hopkinsville required a buggy ride of more than twelve miles.
In this insular world, Cayce grew up as a sensitive, awkward child. Thin and tall for his age, he liked playing and spending time alone and was given to wandering through the meadows and woodlands that surrounded his home. Adults found him distracted and distant. He reported visitations from fairylike “friends” and communications with deceased relatives. At nine, when other boys became obsessed with fishing or sports, Cayce grew enthralled with Scripture and begged his father—a man never quite possessed of steady work—to buy a Bible for their home. He began reading through the entire book each year. One night at age thirteen, this boy who talked with hidden friends and consumed Scripture knelt by his bed and prayed for the ability to be of help to others. Just before going to sleep, he recalled in his memoirs, a glorious light filled the room and a feminine apparition appeared at the foot of his bed, telling him: Thy prayers are heard. You will have your wish. Remain faithful. Be true to yourself. Help the sick, the afflicted.
Cayce first discovered his power for trance readings in 1901 when, stricken by chronic laryngitis, he entered a hypnotic state and successfully diagnosed his own illness. In the years ahead, he worked on the fringes of mainstream medicine—with hypnotists, osteopaths, and homeopaths—going into trance states and prescribing folk cures, natural remedies, and more-conventional treatments for hundreds of ill people. Again and again, stories and testimonies held that his readings and remedies worked. Newspapers and medical investigators began paying attention, and, in what represented Cayce’s debut on the national stage, The New York Times ran a long article on October 9, 1910: Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.
Cayce was not illiterate, but neither was he well educated. He never made it beyond the eighth grade of a rural schoolhouse. Though he taught Sunday school at his Disciples of Christ church, he read little outside of Scripture. Aside from a few on-and-off years wildcatting in Texas oil fields in the early 1920s—where he tried, and failed, to raise money for a hospital based on his clairvoyant cures—Cayce rarely ventured beyond the Bible Belt environs of his childhood. Since the tale of Jonah fleeing from the word of God, prophets have been characterized as reluctant, ordinary folk plucked from reasonably satisfying lives to embark on missions they never sought. In this sense, if the impending Aquarian Age or New Age—the sprawling marketplace of Eastern, esoteric, and therapeutic spirituality that exploded on the national scene in the late 1960s and 1970s—was seeking a prophet,