Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [120]
Having nowhere else to turn—and fearful that his strict Catholic family should ever learn the truth—the boy implored Cayce for advice on how to go on living: “I honestly feel down in my heart that if you can’t help me, no person on earth can.”
The psychic was now well into middle age—a man raised in a backwoods town, who never finished grade school, was called an “illiterate” in the press, read little beyond Scripture, and taught at religiously conservative Sunday schools. In virtually every respect, Cayce might seem a miscast confidant. But he replied with a letter of unusual depth and sensitivity. Cayce told the young man:
Sex, of course, is a great factor in everyone’s life; it is the line between the great and the vagabond, the good and the bad; it is the expression of reactive forces in our very nature; allowed to run wild, to self-indulgence, becomes physical and mental derangement; turned into the real influence it should be in one’s life, connects man closer with his God, and this is the use you should put it to.… That your experience has brought you manifestations that have at times, or often, expressed themselves in sex is not to be wondered at, when we realize that that is the expression of creative life on earth.
Those around the youth, Cayce advised, held no control, no key to the meaning of his existence; he said that the young man’s purpose in life was to discover who he really was and to follow that, always with the aim of Christian love. Within Cayce’s tone and counsel appear the stirrings of the drive toward “self-realization” that marked the alternative spiritual movements and transpersonal therapies of later decades. Yet nothing in Cayce’s background would suggest his ability to write with such insight and depth. Leaving aside whatever debate may be had about the question of his psychical abilities or whether such things exist, Cayce appeared to tap in to something that was knowing, humane, and capable of taking a higher measure of situations—and it all seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere other than the obvious cultural touchstones of his life.
“Knowledge not lived is sin,” read the masthead of a newsletter Cayce published in the months before his death in January 1945. In both deed and word, Cayce embodied the principle that inner teachings must be—if they are to be anything—methods of service. Cayce would have understood the Talmudic precepts that whoever makes a worldly crown of religion will waste away and that saving a single life is as saving the whole world. As practiced by Cayce, esoteric teachings existed to bring respite, to create a “channel” (as he put it) for good into the world. This prophet of the New Age introduced hope and dignity into lives and places where conventional messages and messengers had failed to reach. And this, in the end, was the highest legacy of occult America.
* Bro was one of the first serious journalists to look into Cayce. Her son, Harmon, later worked with Cayce and in 1955 completed a University of Chicago Divinity School doctoral dissertation on Cayce as a religious seer/healer.
Epilogue
AQUARIUS RISING
The New Age Dawns
It is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.
—H. P. BLAVATSKY, THE SECRET DOCTRINE, 1888
As the 1950s ushered in the development of jet propulsion and space flight, Americans became less interested in other-dimensional worlds than in those that lay beyond the stars. For spiritual journeyers, however, the stars and the inner realms could seem intimately related. Space was thought to hold mysteries and possibly unknown intelligences as fantastic as any Masters of Wisdom.
Tantalizing possibilities emerged during the final months of World