Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [136]
Jeane Dixon’s career is explored in Marcia Seligson’s “Dixon mania,” The New York Times Book Review, 10/19/69. Evangeline Adams is considered in Karen Christino’s biography, Foreseeing the Future (Reed Publications, 2000). An overview of Ronald Reagan and astrology appeared in “All the President’s Astrologers,” People magazine, 5/23/88. Also helpful is “Nancy Reagan’s Astrologer,” Time magazine, 5/16/88. Sydney Omarr is quoted from “In the Stars,” Time magazine 8/24/62; Omarr: Astrology and the Man by Norma Lee Browning (Doubleday, 1977); Answer in the Sky … Almost by Sydney Omarr (Hampton Roads, 1995); “Blind Seer Is Still Stargazing” by Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times, 12/13/02; “Sydney Omarr, 76; Astrologer to Stars Wrote World’s Best-Read Horoscopes,” by Sahagun, Los Angeles Times, 1/2/03; and “The Signs Are Right for Astrology,” by Tom Buckley, The New York Times, 12/15/68. Damon Runyon wrote about Professor A. F. Seward in his syndicated column, “As I See It,” of 1/9/37. Seward’s “land cruiser” was the subject of articles in The Lima News (Ohio) of 1/21/30 and 7/25/55.
Historical material on modern numerology appears in Numerology, or What Hath Pythagoras Wrought by Underwood Dudley (Mathematical Association of America, 1997). The terms numerology and scientology first appeared in Stephen Pearl Andrews’s 1871 The Primary Synopsis of Universology and Alwato. He expanded on his use of numerology the following year in The Basic Outline of Universology. Julia Seton’s 1929 Western Symbology is the work that helped popularize the occult use of the term and linked it to the Balliett system.
A useful history of newspaper astrology appears in Penelope McMillan’s “Horoscopes: Fans Bask in Sun Signs,” Los Angeles Times, 6/5/85, and in Geoffrey Dean and Arthur Mather’s “Sun Sign Columns,” Astrological Journal (May–June 1996).
Chapter Eleven: “The Greatest Mystic Who Ever Lived in America”
The Cayce literature is vast and of widely varying quality. Three works merit special mention: Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick (Riverhead, 2000), Edgar Cayce In Context by K. Paul Johnson (State University of New York Press, 1998), and Edgar Cayce’s Bookshelf by David Bell (California Institute of Integral Studies, unpublished dissertation, 1998). Also helpful are: The Lost Memoirs of Edgar Cayce, compiled and edited by A. Robert Smith (A.R.E. Press, 1997), Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father’s Business by Smith (Donning Company, 1988), A Seer Out of Season by Harmon Hartzell Bro, Ph.D. (New American Library, 1989), and The Charisma of the Seer by Bro (University of Chicago Divinity School, unpublished dissertation, 1955). David Kahn is quoted from his memoir, My Life with Edgar Cayce (Doubleday, 1970).
The organization Cayce founded, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), is now an active New Age center in Virginia Beach, encompassing a school of massage in the old hospital building and a reconstituted Atlantic University. A.R.E. maintains an electronic archive of readings and follow-up files that document Cayce’s diagnoses and treatments (though only occasionally from the perspective of medical doctors). The organization categorizes the readings by hyphenated numbers, the first representing the subject and the second representing the sequence. Cayce’s reading for the ex–Silver Shirt official is 2449–1. The subject of 2449–1 is also quoted from Psychic Dictatorship in America by Gerald B. Bryan (Truth Research Publications, 1940). The June 18, 1923, reading is 3744–1. Cayce’s reversal is from June 16, 1939, 3976–24. The so-called Hitler Reading of November 4, 1933,