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In its way, Hugh Lynn said, the story helped him find a kind of peace. “The reading explained very clearly that what I felt for my father and for my mother was memory,” he told his biographer. “And I was responsible for what kind of memory I had. I was imposing on my father a whole set of ideas that didn’t exist. I was jealous of him, but I had no right to be jealous in the present-day situation.… You see, I was putting on him my own weaknesses, my own problems—and we all do it.”

It was similar to the experience of others who sought out Cayce for past-life readings. Whatever their source, Cayce’s hundreds of past-life readings did provide a sense of context and meaning that helped resolve feelings of helplessness and anguish in the lives of their recipients, many of whom returned for multiple sessions. The past-life readings prefigured some of the key themes that later ran through Jungian and transpersonal therapies and the work of widely read mythologists such as Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly. Stripped of occult methodology, the insights of the Cayce readings also echoed Freud’s theories of repression and the development of neuroses.

The Esoteric Healer

After escaping the poverty of Dayton through the help of a new donor in 1925, Cayce relocated his activities to Virginia Beach, a town selected by the readings. Cayce enjoyed the ocean climate and nearby fishing. In Virginia, he at last raised enough money to start his “Hospital of Enlightenment.” In 1929, Cayce and his supporters opened a thirty-bed facility on a small hill overlooking the Atlantic. It provided a comforting, homey setting that more resembled a shingled seaside inn than a medical facility. But it was a real clinic. Amid the sunshine, shuffleboard, and tennis, the Cayce Hospital had a staff of MDs, nurses, osteopaths, and chiropractors. Patients could receive clairvoyant diagnoses and alternative therapies such as massage and colonics, along with modern X rays, urinalyses, and blood work. Cayce delivered a metaphysical lecture each Sunday. He made some of the first prescriptions of meditation as an emotional and physical aid. But, in one of the deepest tragedies of Cayce’s life, the onslaught of the Great Depression closed the hospital within two years. Attempts to open a metaphysical college, Atlantic University, met with similar results. Crestfallen and withdrawn, Cayce sought solace in the activities he knew as a boy: Bible-reading, gardening, fishing, and chopping wood. While his frame sagged under his disappointment, he carried on his clairvoyant readings at an intensive pace.

Readings carried a fee of $20, which included membership in Cayce’s nascent organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.). Records show that he often reduced or waived payments altogether, particularly during the Depression, when he might give a reading for a dollar or two sent by an injured laborer, an ailing homemaker, or the parent of a sick child. Here is Cayce on March 29, 1940, writing to a blind man employed as a chair re-caner, who asked about paying in installments: “You may take care of the membership any way convenient to your self—please know one is not prohibited from having a reading if they really desire same because they haven’t money. If this information is of a divine source it can’t be sold, if it isn’t then it isn’t worth any thing.”

In the kind of medical encounter that typified Cayce’s career, a respected New York publisher, William Sloane, had an unforgettable brush with the readings. In 1940, Sloane agreed to consider a manuscript on the seer’s life, There Is a River, by Thomas Su grue. It was a highly sympathetic biography assembled by a journalist who had been Hugh Lynn’s college roommate and who believed a Cayce reading had saved his life. Sloane was initially wary but changed his mind when Cayce’s clairvoyant diagnosis helped one of his own children. Novelist and screenwriter Nora Ephron recounted the