Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [116]
Leadbeater’s venture into the past began in 1909 when he discovered an unusual, sensitive boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, playing on the beach near Theosophy’s headquarters in Adyar, India. He and Annie Besant saw the boy as the incarnation of a new “World Teacher.” (Krishnamurti did, after breaking with Theosophy, become a deeply respected and unclassifiable spiritual teacher.) Leadbeater began to construct an epic, encyclopedic timeline of the past lives of Krishnamurti and his companions. Calling him by the esoteric name Alcyone (for the entity repeatedly reborn through him), Leadbeater in 1910 began serializing his Lives of Alcyone. Alcyone/Krishnamurti and his historical companions made up the temple hierarchies of mythical Atlantis and ancient Egypt and left their marks as statesmen, alchemists, warriors, and philosophers of the ancient world. In a sense, Leadbeater had created a grand prehistory for the lives of his fellow Theosophists.
Cayce’s readings favored similar historical settings and characters to Leadbeater’s: Atlantis and the cities of Hellenic and pre-Columbian empires. Past lives were not without tragedy: Amid the Egyptian princes and princesses, Hellenic conquerors, and Atlantean priests were also victims of war, rape, and other brutalities—sufferings that, in the philosophy of the Cayce readings, explained present-day neuroses in the lives of their subjects. Indeed, Cayce’s subjects often reported feeling relieved at being able to understand current pathologies or obsessions as the result of violence or tragedy in a previous incarnation.
The Cayce family (in its twentieth-century version) provided a case in point. In his biography by journalist A. Robert Smith, Cayce’s elder son, Hugh Lynn, made the startlingly frank admission that throughout his teenage years he experienced profound sexual longings for his mother. All this came to a head in 1923 when the high-schooler traveled to Dayton to rejoin his family for a troubling Christmas. When his father came to pick him up at the train station, Hugh Lynn hugged him and felt the crinkle of paper: Edgar had stuffed newspaper into his thin overcoat to protect him from the cold of the Midwest winter. Lammers, it seemed, had experienced a series of sudden business setbacks and had left the Cayce family destitute. While embroiled in out-of-town lawsuits, the great searcher into the unknown had not even bothered to send the Cayces a few dollars for groceries. Their Christmas dinner consisted of a chicken that could be cupped in the hands. In another unsettling discovery for the teen who had stood so solidly behind his father, Hugh Lynn was told by Edgar about his new psychical experiments into past lives. And as a Christmas gift, Edgar explained, he had secretly performed one for Hugh Lynn, discovering that the lad had once been a great ruler in ancient Egypt. Even by Cayce standards, the family seemed to have slid off the edge.
But as Hugh Lynn listened to his reading, things began to change. The reading took on the eerily familiar tones of the boy’s innermost conflicts: his agonizing attraction toward his mother and his jealousy and resentment of his father. Hugh Lynn, Edgar revealed, had been an Egyptian monarch who coveted a beautiful dancer named Isis. But Isis’s affections were for the kingdom’s high priest, Ra Ta, with whom she had a daughter. Infuriated, the ruler exiled them both. The high priest, Edgar explained, was an earlier incarnation of Hugh Lynn’s father, and the dancer Isis was the past life of his mother. Hugh Lynn was stunned. He had taken every measure