Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet: What the Readings Say and What Came True

The short answer

Edgar Cayce (March 18, 1877 – January 3, 1945) was an American psychic who, in a self-induced sleep-like state, answered questions about illness, past lives, dreams, business and world history. From 1923 his secretary, Gladys Davis, took down nearly every session in shorthand. In 1931 his supporters founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, which still holds more than 14,000 transcripts.

What is documented: the readings exist, and we know who gave them, when, and how they were kept. What is not documented: that they came from any paranormal source. Wherever Cayce named a place or a year — Atlantis off Bimini, a chamber under the Sphinx, disasters on a schedule — the prediction did not come true.

From Hopkinsville to the New York Times

Cayce grew up on a farm near Hopkinsville in Christian County, Kentucky, in a devout Disciples of Christ family. He left school at 15 after the eighth grade and worked on an uncle's farm, clerked in a bookstore, sold shoes and then sold insurance on the road. That account comes from the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, published by the Library of Virginia — the most careful short biography of him in print.

Two childhood stories run through every Cayce biography: a vision of an angel, and afterward an unusual knack for remembering printed pages. Both come from Cayce's own later telling and from books written by people close to him. They are tradition, not independently witnessed events.

In 1900 he lost his voice for about a year, which ended the insurance job. In 1901 a Hopkinsville hypnotist named Al Layne put him into a trance; in that state, the story goes, Cayce described the cause and a treatment, and his voice came back. Layne then used him as a "medical clairvoyant" for other patients until the state medical board stopped it in 1903. Cayce made his living as a photographer for years afterward, first in Bowling Green, later in Alabama.

National fame came in 1910. A homeopathic physician, Wesley Ketchum, tested Cayce's diagnoses and reported on them to a medical meeting in Boston. On October 9, 1910, the New York Times ran the headline "Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized." Cayce wasn't illiterate — he had eight years of school — but newspapers across the country reprinted the story.

How a reading worked

The setup barely changed in four decades: Cayce lay down, went into the sleep-like state and talked, while someone wrote everything down. From September 1923 that someone was Gladys Davis, who, according to the Library of Virginia, recorded virtually all of his sessions for the next 21 years. The same year, Dayton publisher Arthur Lammers steered him toward astrology, reincarnation and Atlantis. The result was a new kind of session, the "life reading," about a client's past incarnations.

Popular memory remembers the Atlantis prophet. The archive tells a different story — most of it is about bodies:

The readings by subject (1971 count, as reported by the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia)

Type of reading	Number
Physical (health)	8,975
Life (past lives)	about 2,500
Business	799
Dream interpretation	667
Mental and spiritual	401
Oil and mineral locations	223
Buried treasure	76
Historical (13 of them on Atlantis)	36

The A.R.E. puts the total at 14,306 (its website also says 14,307); the Library of Virginia says, more cautiously, "more than 14,000." Atlantis takes up 13 of them.

A hospital, a university and the A.R.E.

Between 1919 and 1923 Cayce spent much of his time in Texas, trying to find oil with readings so he could pay for a hospital of his own. It didn't work. The money came instead from a New York financier, Morton Blumenthal. The Cayces moved to Virginia Beach in 1925; the Cayce Hospital, where patients were treated according to the readings, opened in February 1929, and Atlantic University followed in 1930. The Depression and quarrels among the backers closed both by 1931.

That July, the remaining supporters incorporated the Association for Research and Enlightenment. It grew slowly, through small study groups working from a booklet called A Search for God (1942). Then came Thomas Sugrue's biography There Is a River in December 1942 and the Coronet article in 1943 — and the flood of requests. Cayce had a stroke in September 1944 and died at home on January 3, 1945. He is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Hopkinsville. His sons, Hugh Lynn and Edgar Evans Cayce, kept the organization going; by the end of the twentieth century, the Library of Virginia counts about 30,000 members worldwide. Today the A.R.E. headquarters at 67th Street in Virginia Beach reports more than 100,000 visitors.

The claims you can test

Most readings can't be checked — no one can verify a past life. A handful, though, named places and years. That is where Cayce can be measured.

Atlantis off Bimini, "'68 and '69"

The readings put Atlantis in the Atlantic and describe its destruction in three stages, the last around 10,000 BCE. A 1940 reading, quoted by historian of esotericism Joscelyn Godwin, says that Poseidia will be among the first parts of Atlantis to rise again: "expect it in '68 and '69 — not so far away!" On September 2, 1968, divers off North Bimini in the Bahamas found a half-mile line of flat stone blocks in 18 feet of water. The "Bimini Road" has been held up as the fulfillment ever since.

Geologists disagree. In 1980, anthropologist Marshall McKusick and U.S. Geological Survey geologist Eugene Shinn reported in Nature that the blocks are natural beachrock, which forms quickly in Bimini's calcium-rich water and cracks into rectangular slabs. Radiocarbon dates put the rock at a few thousand years old, not twelve thousand. Nothing rose off Bimini in 1968 or 1969.

The Hall of Records — and the Egyptologist it produced

According to the readings, refugees from Atlantis hid their records in a chamber near the Great Sphinx at Giza, to be found before the end of the twentieth century; Cayce followers often named 1998. The most interesting consequence was a person. In the 1970s, the Cayce foundation helped support a young American dropout named Mark Lehner while he finished his degree in Cairo. Lehner went on to earn a doctorate at Yale and became, in Smithsonian's words, one of the world's leading Sphinx authorities. He later wrote that his early ideas "could not stand up to the bedrock reality of the Giza Plateau." No hall has been found.

California, New York, China, 1998

Readings from the 1930s forecast upheavals for 1936, including the destruction of San Francisco and Los Angeles, followed by New York City. Others announced the discovery of an Atlantean "death ray" in 1958, a Christian China by 1968 and the Second Coming in 1998. None of it happened. Notably, it is the Society for Psychical Research's own encyclopedia — not a skeptics' group — that lists these as the predictions Cayce is criticized for.

The health readings

About 9,000 readings dealt with illness, and this is where care matters most. Supporters point to grateful letters. In 1971 Cayce's sons, Hugh Lynn and Edgar Evans, sampled 150 medical readings and estimated a success rate of about 85 percent — a family estimate, with no control group and no independent review. The Psi Encyclopedia notes that no formal investigation of Cayce's abilities by parapsychologists was ever completed. Philosopher Dale Beyerstein listed the gaps in 1996: no controls, unreliable patient recollections, and no record of what Cayce already knew about the people asking.

We don't pass on any of the so-called Cayce remedies as advice. If you're unwell, see a doctor.

Why Cayce still shapes American spirituality

The Library of Virginia describes the readings as a blend of Theosophy, New Thought and Protestant theology — and Cayce himself taught Sunday school at a Presbyterian church in Virginia Beach for years. What he added was format. Theosophists had written about an "Akashic" record of everything that ever happened, and Rudolf Steiner published his Akasha essays from 1904. Cayce turned it into something personal and very American: a file about your soul, read aloud to you by appointment.

That template is everywhere now. We traced it in our pieces on the Akashic records and past-life regression, and it runs on into today's soul-contract and starseed language. Skeptic Martin Gardner offered the other explanation as early as 1957: Cayce had simply absorbed a great deal of reading and conversation — what psychologists call cryptomnesia.

How to read Cayce today

The readings are a remarkable historical record. If you work with them, a few questions help — our assessment, each based on the cases above:

• Does the claim name a date or a place? Then it can be checked, and so far none has held up.
• Is the quote tied to a numbered reading? The archive numbers every session. A quote with no number is usually second- or third-hand.
• Could Cayce have read it somewhere? Theosophical books and New Thought magazines were widely available in his lifetime.
• Is it about your body? Then a reading is the wrong adviser.

Frequently asked questions

Who was Edgar Cayce?

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was an American psychic from Kentucky. In a sleep-like state he gave more than 14,000 readings between 1901 and 1944 on health, past lives and world events; the transcripts are archived by the A.R.E. in Virginia Beach.

Why is Edgar Cayce called the Sleeping Prophet?

Because he gave his readings lying down with his eyes closed, in a state that looked like sleep. The nickname was popularized by Jess Stearn's 1967 bestseller "The Sleeping Prophet."

Did any of Edgar Cayce's predictions come true?

None that were specific and testable in advance. Atlantis did not rise off Bimini in 1968 or 1969, no Hall of Records has been found at Giza, and the events forecast for 1936, 1958, 1968 and 1998 did not happen.

Is the Bimini Road part of Atlantis?

Geological studies say no. McKusick and Shinn described it in Nature in 1980 as natural beachrock that cracks into slabs, and radiocarbon dates put it at a few thousand years old.

What is the A.R.E.?

The Association for Research and Enlightenment, founded by Cayce and his supporters in 1931 and headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia. It keeps the archive of his readings and runs study groups.

Where is Edgar Cayce buried?

In Riverside Cemetery in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, near where he grew up. He died at his home in Virginia Beach on January 3, 1945.

Sources: K. Paul Johnson, "Edgar Cayce (18 March 1877–3 January 1945)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (2006) · KM Wehrstein, "Edgar Cayce," Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research (2019, updated 2026) · Ann W. Duncan, "Association for Research and Enlightenment Timeline," World Religions and Spirituality Project · Association for Research and Enlightenment, "About Us" (edgarcayce.org) · Joscelyn Godwin on Edgar Cayce and Atlantis (author blog for Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, 2011) · Robert C. Cowen, "Another Atlantis myth exploded," Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 24, 1980 (on McKusick and Shinn, Nature, 1980) · Evan Hadingham, "Uncovering Secrets of the Sphinx," Smithsonian, February 2010 · Sarah Gauch, Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 1997 · Rudolf Steiner, From the Akasha Chronicle (GA 11), preface to the 1939 edition · Wikipedia "Edgar Cayce," "Bimini Road" and "Mark Lehner" (used only as an index of sources, including Gardner 1957, Randi 1982 and Calvert et al. 1979).

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