Cayce’s biographer reported that he vigorously denied being a medium, refusing to entertain messages from the dead and insisting on following a procedure that essentially let him go out to inspect for himself what he needed to know, by a combination of clairvoyance and what seemed to him religious guidance or inspiration. There were in fact solid psychologists who had already investigated him, from Harvard and elsewhere, though none had written him up. If the biographer were correct, no qualified professional scientist had ever investigated Cayce and charged him with error, delusion, or fraud.
How could the proper authorities have missed studying him in depth? Part of modernity was the conviction that science would sooner or later explore every worthwhile lead in the major disciplines. Of course, science was a social institution, subject to pressures of career, money, and respectability. But Cayce represented something, in biblical language, “not done in a corner,” for over four decades. Only my years of banging away at social change helped me to look a little further. It was not difficult to picture responsible social leaders being wrong about political and economic issues. Why should not those of comparable stature in psychology or religion also make mistakes in judgment?
Where should one begin? What would provide entry to Cayce’s world?
One possible avenue was the history of religions, the comparative study of traditions and practices of East and West, ancient and modern. There the rich array of oracles, sibyls, seers, healers, prophets, wonder-workers, and primitive shaman figures might well have types that resembled Cayce enough to help separate usable facts from hasty guesses about him. But my professor of World Religions dismissed them all as victims of “overbeliefs.”
Cayce saw his gifts in the framework of those promised in the Bible, which he had read through once for every year of his life. By now he had almost entirely memorized it (an unheard-of accomplishment in my world of university biblical scholars), in part through his peculiar gift, and in part through teaching it in church school ever since his youth. For him it was the best ultimate background for grasping what was happening in his unusual state. Trying to imagine his viewpoint, I went more than once to the Oriental Institute, just a block from my graduate house, to stand surrounded by artifacts from the Near East. As I wandered through the cool halls with their mute but eloquent displays, ancient Israel, Assyria, Egypt, and Persia stood before me in full dignity, summoned by the stone carvings, the jewelry, the pots and amulets, the mummies, and the figures of the gods. Models of temples and dwellings were arrayed with figurines of horses and chariots. There were javelins like those I had thrown so long in track and field events. On each visit I asked myself whether the people of those times and places had known something which Cayce had discovered again but the rest of us had lost.
There was no reason to think so in my courses on the Bible, where unusual gifts of prophecy or healing were uniformly explained away as mistaken perceptions from a superstitious age when “the sky hung low.”6 There were no miracles or useful trances in the world of the University of Chicago Divinity School; the biblical legacy came without a parted Red, or Reed, Sea or fallen Jericho walls, and certainly without a virgin birth or an empty tomb. The only unusual perception was essentially moral and theological insight. Not arrogance but honest conviction and disciplined scholarship lay behind this position, seen in the writings of gifted theologians such as the existentialist Rudolf Bultmann (whom I came to know well in later years when I brought him to teach in the religion department at Syracuse University, where I held a chair).7 But as though to make up for affronting tradition by discarding so much of scriptural content, the Chicago Divinity School turned intently to facts and empirical inquiry. Its building was next to that of the department of sociology on campus, and more than a few mused that the methods of the two were interchangeable. The model was to inquire, inspect, and analyze—not just to speculate. Surely, this was what the Cayce phenomenon required.
Chicago was the university which took on the discipline in every department of humbling itself before any reality to learn its secrets—even before the unseen atom. What it offered to study Cayce was most of all the attentive empiricism which made the university stand tall on the Midwestern prairies. The school had as yet no history of great formative minds such as had graced European and New England campuses for centuries. John Dewey was no Kant, and Thorstein Veblen no Max Weber. Nor was Chicago rich in literature and the arts, except in criticism. But it was carefully, even ruthlessly determined to be taught by the data at hand, in every field of academic life. That was the reason for the parade of Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry, as well as in economics, that had made (and would continue to make) the university great.
Yet when I stood in the quiet halls of the Oriental Institute, it was not at all clear how to reduce Cayce’s service to inspectable, manipulable circuits of his psyche. In those corridors it seemed that Cayce might lead to encounters with an active, loving Agent that could use ordinary shepherds or fisherfolk, or tent makers (or even photographers such as Cayce) to get wounds healed and minds stretched, or to call entire peoples to new ways of life.
First-Hand Reports
Still, Cayce’s capacity seemed so outrageous, so utterly unlikely, that I might have dismissed it as impossible, but for firsthand reports from those who had sought his strange counsel, called “readings.” Among these were friends of my family, such as the levelheaded Myrtle Walgreen, who years before her present wealth and community leadership had baked the first pies and cooked the first soups in what was now an extensive drugstore chain. She sought Cayce out. Another was Lowell Hoit, the widely read and distinguished head of Chicago’s Board of Trade. A third was Sherwood Eddy, the author and respected leader of the worldwide YMCA, who had not only secured Cayce’s counsel, but gone to see him in action. Then there was my mother.
As a longtime contributor to the Christian Century, a liberal Protestant journal (some of whose editors were leading members of our innovative home church adjoining the university), she had been sent a copy of Cayce’s biography to review or discard. Perhaps her skillful handling of religious controversies in the past, which had won her coverage in Time, prompted an editor to think she could make a sensible evaluation of the hardly believable Cayce story. As someone who had written nearly a dozen books of her own on religious subjects, and been the editor of the Congregational periodical, Social Action, she was a demanding reviewer.
In Cayce’s life she found threads of her own, as she traced his growing up in Kentucky, also once her home, and his vigorous lay leadership in the mainline Protestant group called the Christian Church or Disciples of Christ, which had been her family’s heritage since shortly after its beginnings in 1820. Further, she thought she saw in Cayce some of the disciplined idealism of her generation which had led her and my father (now president of Frances Shimer College in western Illinois) to spend a number of years as educational missionaries in China, my birthplace. And while she had no special interest or knowledge in the psychic field, she was deeply drawn to prayer and had published a widely used book of devotions, Every Day a Prayer,8 as well as learned how to meditate from Gerald Heard, the pioneering British anthropologist and philosopher.9 She concluded she had useful perspectives with which to assess Cayce. So on a lecture trip to New York she took a side journey by overnight train to Virginia, where she could meet Cayce, watch him work, and test him thoroughly with a trance evaluation of her health. Having recently been through a complete workup at the noted medical center in Battle Creek, Michigan, she had sufficient records of medical laboratory work, together with reports by specialized physicians, to measure