Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [115]
For the following month, the men continued their readings, probing further into Hermetic and esoteric spirituality. From a trance state on October 18, Cayce laid out for Lammers, the reincarnated monk, what appeared to be an entire philosophy of life, dealing with reincarnation, man’s role in the cosmic order, and the hidden purpose of existence:
In this we see the plan of development of those individuals set upon this plane, meaning the ability (as would be manifested from the physical) to enter again into the presence of the Creator and become a full part of that creation.
Insofar as this entity is concerned, this is the third appearance on this plane, and before this one, as the monk. We see glimpses in the life of the entity now as were shown in the monk, in his mode of living.
The body is only the vehicle ever of that spirit and soul that waft through all times and ever remain the same.
These phrases were, for Lammers, the golden key to the mysteries: a theory of eternal recurrence that identified man’s purpose on earth as perfectibility through karma and repeat cycles of birth, then reintegration with the source of Creation. This, the printer believed, was the hidden truth behind the Scriptural injunction to be “born again” so as to “enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
“It opens up the door,” Lammers enthused. “It’s like finding the secret chamber of the Great Pyramid.” He told Cayce that the doctrine that had come through the readings seemed to synchronize the wisdom traditions of the world: “It’s Hermetic, it’s Pythagorean, it’s Jewish, it’s Christian!” Cayce wasn’t sure what to believe. “The important thing,” Lammers reassured him, “is that the basic system which runs through all the mystery traditions, whether they come from Tibet or the Pyramids of Egypt, is backed up by you. It’s actually the right system.… It not only agrees with the best ethics of religion and society, it is actually the source of them.”
Lammers’s enthusiasms aside, the religious ideas that emerged from Cayce’s trances did articulate a compelling theology. They sought to marry a Christian moral outlook with the cycles of karma and reincarnation central to Hindu and Buddhist ways of thought and with the Hermetic concept of man as an extension of the Divine. If there was an inner, or occult, philosophy behind the world’s historic faiths, Cayce had come as close as any modern person to defining it.
The Power of Past Lives
Dayton marked a period in which Cayce went beyond medical clairvoyance (though he never abandoned it as the mainstay of his work), engaging more and more in readings on “past lives.” The past lives he found were rarely ordinary. Subjects were often reported to be ancient priests or priestesses, denizens of lost civilizations, historic kings and warriors. Indeed, the figures that populated Cayce’s past-life catalog took forms and personas similar to those who peopled a vast project initiated several years earlier by the English Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater. Both Cayce and Leadbeater attributed their insights to the same source. Cayce said he was able to access cosmic records imprinted on the akasha, or universal ether. These “akashic records” were a concept derived from sacred Hindu writings and popularized in the late nineteenth century by Madame Blavatsky. Cayce, in his Christian worldview, equated akasha with the Book of Life.
Leadbeater and Cayce were probably the two most influential occult thinkers in the years between the world wars—yet the men were stark opposites. Leadbeater was the kind of square-jawed Englishman who made others step out of his way: He was built like a mountain, his angular face was softened only slightly by a bushy beard and wavy white hair, and his glinting eyes were sometimes malevolent, his smile unkind. Leadbeater was a bulldozer, physically and intellectually—world-traveled,