As to just what was the first experience, I don’t know. The one that appears at present to be among the first, was when I was possibly eighteen or twenty months old. I had a playhouse in the back of an old garden, among the honeysuckle and other flowers. At that particular time much of this garden had grown up in tall reeds, as I remember. I had made a little shelter of the tops of the reeds, and had been assisted by an unseen playmate in weaving or fastening them together so they would form a shelter. On pretty days I played there. One afternoon my mother came down the garden walk calling me. My playmate (who appeared to me to be about the same size as myself) was with me. It had never occurred to me that he was not “real,” or that he wasn’t one of the neighbors’ children, until my mother spoke and asked me my playmate’s name. I turned to ask him but he disappeared. For a time this disturbed my mother somewhat, and she questioned me at length. I remember crying because she had spied upon me several times, and each time the playmate would disappear.
About a year or eighteen months later, this was changed considerably—as to the number of playmates. We had moved to another country home. Here I had two favorite places where I played with these unseen people. One very peculiarly was in an old graveyard where the cedar trees had grown up. Under a cedar tree, whose limbs had grown very close to the ground, I made another little retreat, where—with these playmates—I gathered bits of colored glass, beautifully colored leaves and things of that nature from time to time. But, what disturbed me was that I didn’t know where they [the playmates] came from or why they left when some of my family approached. The other retreat was a favorite old straw stack that I used to slide down. This was on the opposite side of the road (main highway) from where we lived, and in front of the house. The most outstanding experience (and one that I am sure disturbed her much) was when my mother looked out a window and saw children sliding down this straw stack with me. Of course, I had a lovely little retreat dug out under the side of the straw ring, in which we often sat and discussed the mighty problems of a three or four year old child. As my mother looked out, she called to ask who were the children playing with me. I realized I didn’t know their names. How were they dressed, you ask? There were boys and girls. It would be impossible (at this date) to describe their dress, figure or face, yet it didn’t then—nor does it now—occur to me that they were any different from myself, except that they had the ability to appear or disappear as our moods changed. Just once I looked out the window from the house and saw the fairies there, beckoning me to come and play. That time also my mother saw them very plainly, but she didn’t make any objection to my going out to play with them. This experience, as I remember now, lasted during a whole season—or summer.
A few years afterwards (when I had grown to be six or seven years old) our home was in a little wood. Here I learned to talk with the trees, or it appeared that they talked with me. I even yet hold that anyone may hear voices, apparently coming from a tree, if willing to choose a tree (a living tree, not a dead one) and sit against it for fifteen to twenty minutes each day (the same time each day) for twenty days. This was my experience. I chose a very lovely tree, and around it I played with my playmates that came (who then seemed very much smaller than I). We built a beautiful bower of hazelnut branches, redwood, dogwood and the like, with wild violets, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and many of the wild mosses that seemed to be especially drawn to this particular little place where I met my friends to talk with—the little elves of the trees. How often these came, I don’t know. We lived there for several years. It was there that I read the Bible through the first time, that I learned to pray, that I had many visions or experiences; not only of visioning the elves but what seemed to me to be the hosts [angels] that must have appeared to the people of old, as recorded in Genesis particularly. In this little bower there was never any intrusion from those outside. It was here that I read the first letter from a girlfriend. It was here that I went to pray when my grandmother died, whom I loved so dearly and who had meant so much to me. To describe these elves of the trees, the fairies of the woods, or—to me—the angels or hosts, with all their beautiful and glorious surroundings, would be almost a sacrilege. They have meant, and do yet, so very much to me that they are as rather the sacred experiences that we do not speak of—any more than we would of our first kiss, and the like. Why do I draw such comparisons? There are, no doubt, physical manifestations that are a counterpart or an expression of all the unseen forces about us, yet we have closed our eyes and our ears to the songs of the spheres, so that we are unable again to hear the voices or to see the forms take shape and minister—yea strengthen us—day by day!
Possibly there are many questions you would ask as to what games we played. Those I played with at the haystack were different from those in the graveyard, or in the garden. Those I played with in the wood were different. They seemed to fit more often to what would interest or develop me. To say they planted the flowers or selected the bower, or the little cove in which my retreat was built, I don’t think would be stretching it at all, or that they tended these or showed me—or talked to me of—their beauty. It was here that I first learned to read. Possibly the hosts on high gave me my first interpretation of that we call the Good Book. I do not think I am stretching my imagination when I say such a thing. We played the games of children, we played being sweethearts, we played being man and wife, we played being sisters and brothers, and we played being visitors and preachers. We played being policemen and the culprits. We played being all the things that we knew about us.
No, I never have any of these visions now, or—if any—very rarely.
EC Report 464–12
When Cayce was fifty-four years old, he had a dream in which these same fairies and elves appeared to him again. The psychic reading on this dream (EC 294–128) explained that these were warnings that his soul would likely return to the spirit realms (to those on earth, that meant that he may die) if his mind did not become more active in this world and find more people requesting his unique services.
When asked during one of his psychic readings to explain brownies, he answered:
The manner in which those of the elementals—entities who have not entered into materiality—have manifested and do at times manifest themselves to the entity. Brownies, pixies, fairies, gnomes are not elementals, but elements that are as definite entities as man materialized.
EC 1265–3
In a past-life reading for another soul, he gave this account:
[B]efore this [incarnation] the entity was in the Scotch land. The entity began its activity as a prodigy, as one already versed in its associations with the unseen or the elemental forces; the fairies and those of every form that do not give expression in a material way and are only seen by those who are attuned to the infinite.
EC 2547–1
Seventy-two of Edgar Cayce’s discourses mention the “the unseen forces,” defined in the readings as “a consciousness of that divine force that emanates in Life itself in this material plane.” (EC 281–7; italics mine) Notice how beautifully this description fits with the Kabbalistic concepts of the Unseen Infinite Eternal (Ein Sof) and the knowable emanations (sefirot).
All projected life in this world comes from unseen influences within, not without. Even human weaknesses and evil are a result of the misuse of free will, a misuse that began in the spirit and mind, long before material life began to express it. The implication here is that all outer influences, whether they are good or evil, emanate from the unseen realms of spirit and mind through the use and misuse of free will.
Consider the worst criminal acts by humans. These are due more to unseen forces within the spirit and mind of the perpetrator than his or her upbringing or genes (not to exclude the effects of both of these). Many souls have been raised by bad parents or nonexistent ones and in terrible environments; some of these children become good people and make much of their lives, while others grow up to virtually destroy everything and everyone they touch. The key element is the influence of the spirit within them and the dark thoughts that make them so dangerous and coldhearted versus the disposition of those that keep on keeping on in ways that are constructive rather than destructive, despite the surrounding circumstances.
Cayce’s readings acknowledge the “warring” that often occurs