by Harmon Hartzell Bro, Ph.D.

As the only living person who worked daily with Cayce on hundreds of his readings of all types (about one in twenty-five of those now on file), I find it daunting to evoke in short compass the real, complex, and immensely appealing person that he was.But as the only graduate-trained social scientist ever to observe and participate in so many of his trance counseling sessions, I feel an obligation to sketch afresh, after half a century, this photographer-seer with his astonishing gifts.

From his life and efforts three challenges remain to all of us, exactly five decades since his death:

(1) how to replicate his gifts,in whole or inpart (often I heard him say to others, "I don't do anything you can't do, if you are willing to pay the price");

(2) how to utilize the imposing array of hypotheses that he and his readings left us, in such diverse fields as medicine, history, psychology, physics, religion, business, and social change; and

(3) how to respond from our deepest selves to the initiatives from the Divine which he both proclaimed and enacted, as "promises" for us all.

To take up these challenges by focusing on Cayce the man, we obviously need more than firsthand memories of participant-observers such as my wife and myself. Fortunately, there are rich supplemental data: Cayce's many letters, not a few with passages indistinguishable in content and style from his readings; several memoirs by him and his father; collections of Cayce's and his wife's dreams (often but not always interpreted by readings); newspaper transcripts of his weekly lectures at the Cayce Hospital; verbal historical accounts supplied to me for several months in 1950 by his son, Hugh Lynn Cayce; the files of many newspaper stories about him; and personal reports by, or interviews of, his close associates (I used a specialized set of a hundred questions to put before each of dozens of his friends and family members for my doctoral dissertation on him at the University of Chicago).

But raw data must be turned into particular variables and correlations to make decisive sense. This is done in part by using theoretical systems within responsible communities of inquiry. Cayce counseled in a reading that his "work" must always bring together both "scientific research" and "ecclesiastical research" (today we would say "religious research," using the critical methods of the humanities and historical inquiry). Stung--or even wounded--to the core by the vivid wonder that Cayce awakened in us, my wife and I have made double careers by teaching and doing research, as well as practicing, in the twin professions of religion and psychology, supported by active engagement of the arts and their language of symbols.

Our impassioned hope has been to get enough of the real, final Cayce into view with identified lawful processes, to engage with our colleagues in actual replication of his central gifts (now at last happening, to a remarkable degree, in some of our Pilgrim Institute research). Memory, data, theory, and practice must then dance together to reveal afresh the faces and hearts of the Edgar and Gertrude we knew half a century ago.

Can We Actually Revisit Cayce?

The precise answer must, of course, be no. Their world has gone. We sing different songs, eat frozen foods, meet the news and our hidden impulses on television, fly instead of take trains, find distant peoples of the world jostling us, practice sex and even kissing differently, live more in cities, engage minority persons on all sides, shop

in temples called malls, abuse far more chemicals, do athletics for money, and expose all our heroes even as we venerate them. Trying to find afresh these Southern church folk, called by prayer and the Bible into gifts of flaming helpfulness, stumbles over the problem of even talking meaningfully about them, beyond patronizing prattle.

Our modern sound bites can eat them alive and never touch them. Especially awkward for us moderns are the whizzing feats of computers. Cayce's discourses are too easily seen as printouts, rather than as the immensely personal engagements of one person at a time--which we saw so poignantly--in which his style, word choice, and archetypal reference points shifted so clearly from one reading to another.

What we experienced as almost love poetry embedded in practical counsel, as each seeker was invited to the Great Dance with the Indescribable Holy, now seems just more stuff to be scanned and mastered in the American fascination with now-how--but not know why or know-Whose. Yet some of the changes in fifty years may help us to meet the Cayces with untricked gaze. For example, thoughtful feminism may help us to grasp his receptivity, waiting for one person at a time to seek an encounter, rather than trying to ravish the world with arcane wisdom and money-making power.

And today's small sharing groups, born of painful recovery from addiction and abuse (and isn't such obsession near to the heart of any karma?), may show his small group disciplines to be the crowning achievement of his turbulent life. Despite the obstacles, the call to revisit Cayce is not to be ignored. There are four key elements for us to consider.

First of all, there is the man in context of his times and values and people. That element provides a tempering to distortions in the other three parts of his legacy. Second is his rich gifts; third, his findings and concepts in the readings; and, fourth, the patterns and organizations among those who count themselves in some way his followers.

Pronouncements about the readings forever crowd out the others, because scribes always outnumber prophets, and texts can be comfortably manipulated apart from life-settings, as a real man cannot. Then his staggering gifts, of which the readings process was only the crown. These gifts made up a "volcano of love," often more talked about than approached by us today as we try to use Cayce's own life experience as a guide. And the tasks of building organizations to magnify and exhibit Cayce take on lives of their own, sometimes in forms which he did not encourage or even allow, in our understandable zeal to find niche markets, though they may trivialize the whole legacy.

We need to keep rediscovering Cayce the man, as we take the whole daunting and lovely story into the next century.

Cayce the Man: Some Defining Motifs

How to illuminate the crucial motifs of his personhood haunted me in writing his biography, A Seer Out of Season: The Life of Edgar Cayce. Since 1980 that task has been further sharpened by my being asked to consult on numerous film scripts and TV documentaries which seek to portray his life, too often trying to package him with sufficient violence, sex, and spookiness to grab bored viewers. For both purposes I have returned to the question: Whom did Cayce himself try to recruit?

It was not psychics. It was not Bible teachers. It was not photographers. It was not media personalities or political figures or famed researchers or financial tycoons. He did serious business with all of these--more than most of his followers realize. But those he sought out and nurtured most, from his late youth to his death, were MEDICAL MISSIONARIES for service in undeveloped countries. By the end of his life, there were scores in countries around the world who had taken up his calling under the aegis of the man we would revisit.

It seems reasonable to seek Cayce himself in these ranks. This kind of missionary renders medical aid to people who are often without other resources for their pain, in such a relatively selfless way as finally to prompt the question: Who are You? Why are you Here? What do you ant with us? Only then might the transplanted doctor speak some quiet words about his Lord; most of the preaching was simply the doing. Edgar Cayce went to no foreign culture, but the America of two world wars, the roaring twenties, and the Great Depression held all the challenges a man of faith might dare to take on. His daily gift was medical aid, and his gospel shared in respectful modesty, never trumpeted.

We must see him first, then as a man of SERVICE TO THOSE GRIPPED BY PAIN.

His lifelong Sunday afternoon trips to people in jails and prisons was of the same order. Fame visited him at times, but he himself visited those behind bars or encased in troubled flesh, seventy percent of his recorded readings were medical. What did he offer to sufferers? Ultimately, it was RELATIONSHIPS, NOT POWERS. We who peer at him are dazzled by the information he could supply. But what he actually offered was "love supprised by wisdom," as he took on those who approached him for medical aid (often as the last resort) or those who received him in smelly cells.

He was about true engagement, both of one's fellow human beings and of the Divine. Here the label of psychic simply doesn't fit him. He brought the values of the good, the true, the beautiful, and above all the holy, where in our culture diviners, channelers, and purveyors of the future bring powers, typically supplying unknowns of love, money, afterlife, and fame .

Insofar as those who honor Cayce today stress paranormal wonders as defining the man and his mission, they sell him out to the American predatory obsession with using everything, though seeing little. I cannot remember Cayce describing himself in my presence as a "psychic"; he spoke rather of "the thing I do" and credited it to God's grace and helpfulness.

We must note with care the profound HUMILITY that informed all he did and said. The wellspring of it was his prayer life, which we all partook of daily at two in the afternoon, when the entire office staff gathered around a large oak table in his library area for Bible readings, quiet sharing, and heartfelt prayer. The same bowing of the soul before God began each reading session, twice a day, when he spoke aloud but inwardly touched back (he said) to the promise of a helpful gift given him in a mystical experience as a boy.

The humility was there, too, in church, where I worshiped and sang hymns beside him, as it was in his table graces. And, of course, that same open-heartedness defined his engagement of strangers, family, tradespeople. He was not chatty, either in prayer

or in conversation, but neither was he ponderous or pompously spiritual. He was straightforward and gracious, ready to smile with his whole face or to speak gravely--always under the tutelage of the person before him.

Of all that I recall with deep feeling about Cayce the man, it is his modesty, his God-evoked humility, which I find hardest to represent today to my associates fascinated with his powers. Yet it may be decisive for such gifts.

Clearly this modesty, including self-deprecation with wry humor,was a chosen discipline,not wholly a natural posture. For he was a man of great bearing, who knew he

was special. Head waiters and church ushers, grocery clerks and physicians, all showed a spontaneous deference in meeting him.Though he was affable,there seemed to be an appropriate distance in approaching him, fittingly symbolized by Southern custom which had all but his wife address him as "Mr. Cayce"--never "Edgar."

His dreams and mystical experiences, which he shared with me in great reticence, had shown him chosen to help prepare the way for the return of the Christ to His own.

He did not doubt the call nor the implications for his stature, though he understood that the first shall be last and that love requires preferring the other person sincerely.

He must also be described as a man of high intelligence, as his readings commented on him, and his lack of formal education beyond grade school had been easily compensated by his rich church experience (churches were the center of social, intellectual, political,

and artistic life, where he lived) and the astonishing array of famous people--from Houdini to Barrymore to Woodrow Wilson--who had sought him out (he was twice brought to the White House by Edith Wilson to give readings).

His full stature, then, which we saw when he was teaching the Bible or eloquently lecturing, was so close to the Cayce giving readings as to be almost indistinguishable.

Still, there was a dark shadow of self-doubt that lived somewhere inside him. He knew that he had once lost his gift--he then thought permanently--by using it to predict the

outcome of horse races. He remembered the time he was brought to Chicago to demonstrate his gift for a newspaper, and the editors demanded that he levitate an

elephant. He looked back on his period of giving oil drilling readings and heading the Cayce Petroleum Company in Texas as a time when he had lost his way--and nearly lost his family--and when his readings had apparently gone wrong for the first time.

He was stained by the loss of his hospital and university, when he could not provide sufficient leadership to hold his quarrelsome backers together. He argued hotly with his gifted elder son, Hugh Lynn, who was his principal helper, his tormentor, and his conscience (being identified in readings as once an associate of Jesus). So, as a natural extremist by temperament, he could be moody, suddenly withdrawn, and needful of appreciation.

A reading said that in a prior life he had once killed himself when shamed in a position of authority and that overcoming this destructive self doubt and impulsive rage was a primary goal of his present lifetime.

But if an individual is finally best known by where he or she has been or is headed rather than by where he or she has been, then we must meet Cayce as a person SEEKING THE CLOSER WALK WITH GOD. This was the defining relationship from which all others spring. As he quoted, "We love because He first loved us," not in duty but in delight. When, in the press of wartime calls to all of for sacrifice I saw him give not one but six or even eight readings at each session, knowing that it might kill him, I saw the passion for that closer walk.

When I went to interview the Blumenthal brothers, who had betrayed and attacked him after building him a hospital and a fledgling university, I saw his earnest invitation to reconciliation which he had me bear (it was fruitless), the same longing for the closer walk. When he blew up at his secretary or very rarely at his wife in the press of life-and-death concerns carried in readings to be more of God's man.

During the decades since his death, I have often found it difficult to convey to Cayce enthusiasts his passion for such God-fired DAILY LIVING, as contrasted with waving the banner of REINCARNATION. When I knew him, neither he nor his wife had any doubts that they had lived before and would again, not that major themes of their lives and pilgrimages Godward came with them as they were born in the south into particular bodies and families.

On rare occasions they would speak of tough decisions and relationships by employing reincarnation imagery--but not more than any of us would do when assessing childhood influences. Past lives were there, like history and climate, geography and parents, or lost loves and unforgotten hopes in earlier years. But Cayce saw himself as Christ's man, however faltering at times. In this role what mattered was what he would DO NOW, under what ideal with what trust, with which people--today,

So like the Buddha (as I knew him from my studies), he discouraged speculation in favor of APPLICATION. Asked which was the best translation of the Bible (which I dearly wanted to know, after my graduate courses in the Bible), he replied as did his readings:the one you live. His focus was on present choices and service, on creations and confessions, reincarnation was not for him a cause, but a sensible matter to know about.

What drew him to people was not who they had once been or what they had done (even when confronted, rarely, with readings for persons who were formerly Franz Liszt or Thomas Jefferson or Alexander the Great or Achilles or Judas Iscariot). Cayce had made his living over most of his life as a portrait artist--complemented his wife who tinted his photos.

As such an artist, interested not simply in fashioning likenesses, I hinted at greatness and darkness in the person him or in suggesting the telling currents of relationships among those grouped before his lens. He sought out what might be evoked in souls-in-process and national prizes for his work. One could say that he collected people as treasures, each one unique, and his flashpowder and bla~k box camera to call for - true destinies--right then.

When he taught the Bible,whether at church or at his home, it was again portraits he shared. He narrated biblical events as person-disclosing stories, in all complexity, doubt, and grandeur. One left the class pondering the mysterious depths of one's own being the even-greater mystery of God's dependable love.

After testing Cayce many times, I became convinced that he had, in fact, memorized practically all of the Bible, but I saw that he did not use this bewildering skill to scold, lecture, moralize, or pontificate. He used it to open up the human drama and to reach for the best in us. was a biblical man, not because of what he could quote but because he could lead us beside the parted Reed Sea (Red Sea) or Galilee's fish-laden waters or Paul's ship bashing Mediterranean storms--and at each place inviting us to life-transforming choices of our own.

As their Bible study suggests, Edgar and Gertrude were not the consummate outsiders which they become for so many in Cayce circles today, linked to astrology, spaceships, soul mates, chakras, pyramids, earth changes, and psychic feats--all alluring to those who feel estranged from much of mainstream culture who seek a secret edge over peers.

These were family-centered people,cherishing relatives while aware of their frailties. They were loyal to longstanding friends as seen in their letters and heard in their phone prayers--and some times evidenced in spontaneous sittings given before the mailed or telegraphed request one of these had yet arrived. They were plugged into the world, reading the Saturday Evening Post and listening to favorite radio programs, though the day's readings might have spoken of "sojourns in Jupiter" ,Atlantis spaceships.

I was especially impressed with the history of dogged accountability to those in professional life and leadership, considering that he might have had a guru like following in a kind of Cayce club of devotees without this effort. Wherever he had lived or worked Texas), he had sought out physicians to monitor his readings.

He took on international leaders in both Protestant and Catholic church life. He worked with writers,publishers,radio interviewers. He engaged chemists, engineers, inventors. He opened his work and his heart to scholars and educators.

And he did not step away from political leaders; I answered the phone when the vice-president of the United States called for a series of appointments to get readings on commanders and move- ments in China . The two leading parapsychologists in the country, J.B. Rhine and Gardner Murphy, were in serious, though cautious dialogue with him; he did experiments they asked.

In time I came to see Cayce's unfailing spirit of accountability as his expression of the First Commandment, to have no false gods. Only by being challenged and checked by the best would he avoid being trapped in private self-importance or delusory feats. This disciplined commitrnent to public accountability is a pattern that I have longed to see grow among Cayce followers across the decades.

For Cayce was never about Cayce. he had pride, to be sure. He could be touchy, though I never saw him vain or pretentious. But he himself was not the business at hand. He was instead about the almost unbelievable promises of God to engage humans in their "temples," their flesh and daily circumstances, though in lawful ways that must be learned.

What to make of the man Cayce seemed to him a matter of humorous indifference, compared with the depth and beauty and wonder of what he was given to enact. I delighted in watching him show visitors the shortest reading in his files--given on himself, with one sentence rebuke for not having done what he had been told in prior counsel. His aspiration ran far beyond the spirit of self-development and self-perfection, both psychological and spiritual, that has so often corrupted those who have followed him and read books about him.

He wanted to be--and largely was--what Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whom the Nazis imprisoned for his outspoken faith) called Jesus: simply "a man for others. " He was a walking rebuke to all our modern narcissism.

We knew that each time he entered his study to give readings, he risked his life. His own trance counsel stressed that he was pulled like a window blind to the absolute limit. Doctors told us his condition was nearer to a death coma than to usual hypnotic states. Family members recounted how sometimes, when overtired, he had failed to awaken from trance and slowly slipped toward dying.

They had ended up on their knees before his couch, praying for his life. Each session was, therefore, like attending a deep-sea diver lowered to a level beyond any safe limits. But this photographer-seer took one of his nagging flaws, his extremism, and turned it into a strength: the strength to risk all twice a day with one he called "the Master," who had gone the dangerous way of the cross right to the empty tomb that burst open with life for others.