Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [118]
A member of my family, one of my children, had been in great and continuing pain. We’d been to all the doctors and dentists in the area and all the tests were negative and the pain was still there. I wrote Cayce, told him my child was in pain and would be at a certain place at such-and-such a time, and enclosed a check for $25. He wrote back that there was an infection in the jaw behind a particular tooth. So I took the child to the dentist and told him to pull the tooth. The dentist refused—he said his professional ethics prevented him from pulling sound teeth. Finally, I told him he would have to pull it. One tooth more or less didn’t matter, I said—I couldn’t live with the child in such pain. So he pulled the tooth and the infection was there and the pain went away. I was a little shook. I’m the kind of man who believes in X-rays. About this time, a member of my staff who thought I was nuts to get involved with this took even more precautions in writing to Cayce than I did, and he sent her back facts about her own body only she could have known. So I published Sugrue’s book.
Come as You Were
There Is a River appeared in 1942, less than three years before Cayce’s death, and brought him the kind of national attention his admirers had long wanted. In its review pages, The Christian Century, a journal not typically given to occult enthusiasms, called Cayce “a genuine psychic and … also a simple, direct and religious personality.” The reviewer, Margueritte Harmon Bro, followed up with a widely circulated article, “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” which appeared in the newsstand digest Coronet.* The wave of publicity brought equal attention to the spiritual and psychical concepts in the Cayce readings, including astrology, reincarnation, karma, mind–body healing, and trance cognition. Such material was now making inroads into mainstream publishing houses. Another book that began its publishing life with Sloane went one step further in establishing Cayce and his ideas.
The year 1956 saw the publication of a sensationally popular best seller, The Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist and Ivy League–educated dealer in scrap metal and heavy machinery. (He jokingly referred to his family business as “Ulcers, Incorporated.”) Inspired by Cayce’s career, Bernstein conducted a series of experiments with a Pueblo, Colorado, housewife who, under a hypnotic trance, regressed into a past-life persona: an early-nineteenth-century Irish country girl named Bridey Murphy. The entranced homemaker spoke in an Irish brogue and recounted comprehensive details of her life more than a century earlier. On paper and in person, Bernstein exuded a likability and genuineness that made him a hugely convincing figure, nothing like the Poe-styled version of a creepy Mesmerist that was making the rounds in Hammer horror films. In fact, when Bernstein’s story came to the screen, actor Louis Hayward captured his dry, straight-talking style impeccably in a much-hyped movie version of The Search for Bridey Murphy, which was rushed into production later that year.
Suddenly, reincarnation—an ancient Hindu concept about which Americans had heard little before World War II—was the latest craze. In 1956, Life magazine wrote of past-life costume soirees called Come as You Were parties. A popular joke made the rounds: Did you hear the one about the man who read Bridey Murphy and changed his will? He left everything to himself. Books on occultism, hypnosis, and reincarnation were suddenly mainstream hits. “It’s the hottest thing since Norman Vincent Peale,” reported a Houston bookseller. Melvin Powers, a pioneering New Age publisher in Los Angeles, saw sales on some of his titles multiply twenty-five times.
Not everyone was amused. Mainstream medical authorities had long been seeking a proper place