According to Edgar Cayce, by late 2001 a huge chamber beneath the Sphinx, by the Great Pyramid, should have been opened. He believed that inside the chamber is a magical library, left there by Atlanteans, with information that will shock the world. In fact, we should now be living in Year Two of the Age of Aquarius, an era of peace and harmony ushered in by Jesus Christ Himself. Yet, as the year 2000 receded and the planet blundered past this much-touted deadline, believers in Cayce’s prophetic power continue to insist that their man is right and its ‘simply a matter of time’. In the Spirit world, they say, two or three years either way mean nothing.

They believe that, even as you read this, the Earth is shifting round its rotational axis, accelerating over the coming months, eventually flipping the planetary poles on their heads. Japan, Eastern Europe and much of Midwest America will be inundated. While this is going on, China will become a bastion of Christianity and the secret chamber under the left paw of the Sphinx at Giza will be found, revealing the distilled knowledge of the Atlanteans. However, our attentions will be elsewhere as the West is on the brink of a Third World War which will quickly spiral out of control, having been sparked off by events in the Middle East. It goes without saying that none of these things have happened...yet. Either Cayce is wrong, his followers are misinformed, or his timescale badly askew.

Nevertheless, there are hints that some of these predictions may yet come about, albeit in a different manner to that predicted by Cayce. The ever-escalating tension in the Middle East is familiar to us all; global warming is causing sea levels to rise; and the latest probe into the Pyramid of Cheops, while providing no great revelation, still holds out the possibility of further discoveries. On the other hand, China has expelled Christian missionaries and placed limitations on local Christians; the world does not appear to be rotating around a new axis; and no new leader has emerged to usher in the Age of Aquarius. If only Cayce had stuck to medical cures and giving advice, his position as a great prophet would be unassailable.

Edgar Cayce was widely regarded as a prophet and mystic, one of the great clairvoyants and psychics of the 20th century. His followers claim that he cured hundreds of people; that he was a kind of latter day Nostradamus, a seer without parallel in modern times. Detractors, on the other hand, portray him as an attention-seeker, pointing out that many of his prophecies have not stood the test of time, or with hindsight seem absurdly simple. He was unscientific, in that many of his cures could not be replicated and the “over 85 per cent” success rate of cures claimed for him has never been independently verified.

For others, he lost credibility once he began a long series of pronouncements on the legendary civilisations of Atlantis and Poseidon. Atlantis came in for special attention, occupying more than 30 per cent of his ‘readings’ over a 21-year period. Cayce outlined its history, its social structure and religious beliefs. A great war between two factions – one spiritual and the other hedonistic – led to the eventual destruction of the continent itself; but not before Atlantean culture had permeated the whole world.

According to Cayce, the Atlanteans discovered electricity around 50,000 BC and harnessed the power of the atom, which they judged unstable, abandoning it in favour of an alternative power source, a ‘Great Crystal’. The Atlantean race was telepathic, he said, and making a ‘comeback’ – reincarnating in the modern era, as he had done. He even admitted that he had once lived in Atlantis as a priest-healer called ‘Ra-Ta’.

Cayce insisted that the sunken continent would be rediscovered in our time; he seemed certain that, in 1968 or 1969, a portion of an Atlantean temple would be found underwater in the Bahamas, and an ancient healing spring would be rediscovered on Bimini Island. Over the years, archæologists and various teams of divers have spent a huge amount of time and no small fortune searching for these locations… to no avail. Yet, in September 1968 (the year that Cayce specified), Doctor J Manson Valentine discovered what looked like blocks of stone in deep water off the Bahamas. They appeared to have been carefully laid to form a causeway 1,600ft (488m) long, and 300ft (91m) wide. An adjacent line of blocks formed a ‘J’ shape. Believers assumed this was the work of Atlanteans, and theories abounded as to what these underwater causeways were – part of a sea defence, perhaps, or docks. So far, repeated, painstaking explorations have shown that the causeways lead nowhere and geologists now regard them as natural, albeit unusual, fragmentation of rock on the seabed.

A hitherto ignored small well on Bimini, fed by spring water, was claimed to be the ‘healing spring’; however, despite the fact that its water, apparently, contains an unusual number of minerals, it has yet to heal anyone. Such is the intensity of belief surrounding Cayce’s prophecies that, 57 years after his death, supporters would rather believe in a conspiracy to silence him than face the possibility that, in most cases, he was wide of the mark. Even now, Cayce is virtually synonymous with Atlantis and his far more important output has been all but forgotten.

Most scholars concur that Atlantis was probably a figment of Plato’s imagination – its very name was a metaphor to the Greeks for an advanced civilisation – yet romantic notions of Atlantis have a powerful hold on the modern psyche, inspiring books and movies, theories and cults. This is the legacy of Edgar Cayce, even more than it is of Ignatius Donnelly, who effectively ‘reinvented’ Atlantis 100 years earlier. An obsession with Cayce’s Atlantis predictions permeates the New Age movement, causing the rest of his work to be overshadowed.

Edgar Cayce was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877, to become one of a long tradition of American ‘Sleeping Prophets’ – people who utter prophecies while seemingly unconscious. They were believed to be able to diagnose illnesses in people that they had not seen before; indeed, often not needing to see the patient at all. What they all had in common was an elementary education, often an impoverished background, and a simple lifestyle. Many had simple, ordinary jobs when ‘awake’; Cayce worked with his wife as a professional photographer until he devoted himself full-time to his ‘readings’. Typically, none seemed to have made any money from their gifts.

A ‘Sleeping Prophet’ fell into a light trance resembling sleep, but spoke clearly and loudly as though awake. Cayce’s method was to go into a self-induced sleep and answer questions that were put to him, either directly or via a secretary. As his fame grew, the queues for a sitting became longer, and included such public figures as Houdini and Edith Wilson (wife of President Woodrow Wilson).

In these trances, Cayce spoke about nearly everything: including the genesis of man, the nature of the soul, medical remedies, auras, reincarnation, the future for mankind, the Bible, Christ’s work on Earth, dreams, out-of-body experiences, precognition, retro-cognition, demonology, psychometry, and many other occult subjects. He also commented on the Dead Sea Scrolls and made predictions for World War II, the Millennium and beyond, as well as a bizarre blueprint for a ‘no-fuel motor’.

In his waking hours he issued warnings to various people who, he believed, were in imminent danger, gave clairvoyant sittings, interpreted dreams, and dispensed a good deal of common-sense advice. In his lifetime he was labelled ‘The Father of Holistic Medicine’ and ‘The most mysterious man in America’. J Edgar Hoover allegedly had him closely watched, and the FBI is said to have taken a great interest in the ‘no-fuel motor’. However, even as Cayce was describing the engine, it was clear that it would never work. Subsequently, he blamed the failure on the camshafts, then the bearings and then what he called the “sprangles”. In the end he gave up, saying modern technology was too backward, but that one day his motor would be understood.

There are many hundreds of books about Cayce’s life and teachings and thousands of web pages. At least two websites are devoted solely to an international catalogue of books about him and his work. His followers claim that he had the remedy for every conceivable ailment – from rickets and madness to alcoholism and Multiple Sclerosis – and it’s true that he had some spectacular results. As he usually eschewed modern remedies and prescribed a drink of Coca-Cola, a specific herb, prayer, or even a particular posture, the mainstream medical lobby was both puzzled and enraged.

There are hundreds of seemingly insoluble cases in which Cayce provided the answer, without ever meeting the patient. A girl in a faraway city was described to him as being ‘mad’. He explained that a wisdom tooth had impacted itself in a manner which affected certain nerves leading to her brain. He was right and the girl made a swift, full recovery. Today an X-ray could provide the answer, but Cayce diagnosed the problem in seconds without ever seeing the girl. At other times, he prescribed a long-forgotten or obselete medicine and then told the patient where he would find it; often in a musty warehouse or in some neglected corner of an old pharmacy. On occasion, he would recommend a patient to carry a stone with them, or to adopt a particular colour; stones, crystals and colours, he insisted, all vibrated and had particular atomic properties.

Regarding mankind, he had little new to say, but more than once elaborated on the so-called ‘missing link’. Like several other seers and clairvoyants, he maintained that the missing link didn’t exist. Instead, God’s will had become imbued in an ape that greatly resembled man, and this ape was thus instantly gifted with creativity and the ability to plan and communicate. From then on, man was driven to evolve; but virtually instantaneously, not over millions of years. Interestingly, he declared that the ape in question had a “structure very similar to man’s” – as we now know, the DNA of man and that of the chimpanzee differ only in about 5 per cent of the chain.

He stated that no part of space is empty and that God’s will and power is transmitted via rays. We are all, he said, spiritual beings, going through a material experience on Earth as part of a much greater and more complex journey back to our source and true origin, the Godhead. His views on life are even more controversial. He claimed that a soul hovers over a child some six months before the child is born, and sometimes does not enter that child’s body until a month after the birth. It seems that each soul needs to consider carefully whether this particular body is the right one for its intended purpose. However, little of this is new; decades earlier Allen Kardec, in his Spirits Book, propounded his theory of mediumship, declaring that spirits can enter our minds and take us over as easily as a householder walking through his front door.

Dreams were a Cayce speciality: he believed they were a way of communicating with the dead and with the ‘higher self’. Dreams could contain hidden clues or warnings, and sometimes were the key to ‘Akashic’ records – referring to the Theosophical idea of a mystical ‘log book’ of a person’s incarnations. He was a great advocate of the ‘dream diary’, advising us all to keep a pad by the bedside and to write down the dream’s details on waking.

Cayce predicted that the Atlantean Library would be found in 1998 and opened in 2001, ushering in the Age of Aquarius (a prediction embellished by many others). He did make a serious error in claiming that the stones for the pyramids were ‘levitated’ there by the Atlanteans. Unfortunately for those who blindly follow Cayce, it was not long after he said this that researchers found the remnants of a number of ramps and lifting cradles which the Egyptians used to drag the stones along. In fact, the process is shown in at least half a dozen hieroglyphic sequences.

Cayce might well have been right, however, about the pyramids’ age. He said they were built around 10,500BC; older than most people thought. He also believed that there was more of interest below ground than above it, and that the Sphinx may be the gate into a massive subterranean complex. This complex includes the Atlantean Library, the corpse of Akhenaten and a sealed room dubbed by Cayce ‘The Hall of Records’. This was dismissed as fanciful speculation until the recent discovery – by Chicago University professor Mark Lehner – of an unexplored shaft in the Great Pyramid, leading to renewed speculation that some internal ‘walls’ might be false fronts for other chambers.

Prof Lehner, however, has a vested interest; both his education and his Egypt expeditions were funded by the Edgar Cayce Foundation. The fact is that none of his claims have been verified. Sceptics counter-claim that the ‘tunnels’ may well be faults created by the sheer weight of the masonry above, while the false walls are merely part of a sequence of traps for grave robbers. As the specified date for the discovery of the Hall of Records approached then passed without revelation, Cayce’s followers went into overdrive with what looks suspiciously like a ‘covering strategy’.

However, they remain undeterred and firmly believe that the Library will come to light soon. And when it is found, they say, only those fit to understand it, and with appropriately heightened senses, will be able to access it. Cynics and those deemed unworthy will see merely an empty chamber. In addition, the tablets on which the information is encoded will appear blank to anyone who approaches them in the wrong frame of mind.

The real surprise is how Cayce found the time; each day he’d go into trances, morning and afternoon, and respond to questions put to him. Many of his answers are incredibly abstruse. While he was awake, he spoke normally but, in trance, his language was convoluted and loaded with pseudo-scientific phraseology. The readings often rambled interminably; he was perhaps simply trying to be precise, but many ‘readings’ are open to all kinds of interpretation.

It has been suggested that Cayce was acting as a conduit for another entity. Under trance conditions, his voice became a monotone drone with little inflection or emphasis and, unless it was directly relevant to his listeners, quickly became boring. Either way, he often seemed unable to give a straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and embellished (sometimes wildly) every subject, often moving away from the original question. It’s perhaps this ponderous language that has kept Cayce from a wider audience. When talking about Atlantis and the ancient Egyptians in particular, he often referred to artefacts, people, or events that were completely unknown to his listeners; his followers say that, in time, all will be explained.

Inevitably, this vagueness has allowed all manner of cranks and dreamers to pick up on Cayce’s readings and twist them to suit their own beliefs. Cayce’s statement about the souls of newborn children was taken up by pro-choice campaigners and used to demonstrate that the body is merely a receptacle, and that Cayce had ‘endorsed’ abortion.

Cayce’s adherents claim that he has revealed the true meaning of the Book of Revelation. According to Cayce, the book is a code which refers to the human body. Thus, for example, ‘the Seven Seals’ symbolise the seven main glands, or spiritual centres; while ‘the Lamb’ symbolises the higher consciousness (i.e., Christ) that is in all of us. This is nothing new – essentially a re-hash of various mediæval alchemical tracts – although how Cayce knew of this material is not explained.

In all, stenographers recorded over 14,000 of Cayce’s ‘readings’ and, in 1931, these were transferred to the Edgar Cayce Association headquarters in Virginia and archived. The Association is still active, investigating claims, checking out cures and monitoring readings that have not yet come to fruition, and their archives are apparently open to all.

Edgar Cayce, by all accounts, was a quiet, neat man, who had allegedly survived a near-death experience as a child, after which his abilities became more prominent. It seems that he had no need to study; he simply went to sleep with a book under his pillow and its content was absorbed by his mind. He vowed to read the Bible cover to cover at least once a year; prayer was an important part of his daily regime and a prerequisite for his cures.

He was deeply religious and worried greatly about his ‘visions’. A big concern for him was that many of the visions included information on reincarnation and the nature of the soul, much of which was at variance with Christian teaching. Over the years, he managed to reconcile these discrepancies, maintaining that all religions shared a common thread going back to the dawn of time. Quiet and unassuming, Cayce never sought the limelight, and had a dignity and authority which commanded respect. (Only his wife ever called him ‘Edgar’, everyone else felt obliged to call him ‘Mr Cayce’.)

Like so many seers, healers and prophets, his life was stressful, often poverty-stricken and sometimes humiliating. In his unfinished autobiography, My Life as a Seer, he spoke about numerous ‘defeats’ including his studio burning down, his hospital closing for lack of funds, eviction from his home, financial shenanigans from people who had promised to bankroll him, and constant pressure from those determined to expose him as a fraud. Nevertheless, he took seriously his responsibility to his patients, having often doubted the source of his ‘gift’ and worried about the effect of his revelations on listeners. He brooded, too, about a past life in which he had avoided a crucial decision by committing suicide, and believed that in some way he had to atone for this.

Whatever the source of Cayce’s predictions and readings, it often treated its mouthpiece harshly and with a peculiar sense of humour. There must have been times when Cayce questioned what he was saying – such as the claim that Atlanteans had ‘astrally projected’ themselves to the Moon – and its easy to see how such an eminently sober and pious man must have been confused. Anyone challenging established Bible teachings was courting trouble; and so it was for Cayce. He was once arrested for practising medicine without a licence and often received threats from individuals and religious groups.

But the blows to his dignity were the most painful. In one public lecture, a jeering audience challenged him to levitate an elephant. And his eldest son, with whom he was often at odds, became an alcoholic. In time Cayce’s marked inferiority complex got the better of him and, as his depressions deepened, so did his ‘trances’. On several occasions it was thought he’d died when his assistants found it increasingly hard to wake him. Indeed, his eventual death, it is said, was due to a trance that could not be ‘reversed’. Among his last pronouncements was this statement: “There is nothing that I do, which you can’t do too, if you are willing to pay the price.” Sadly, he offered no details.

Cayce has become a US institution, the best-known psychic in the country’s history. Fifty-seven years after his death, he still makes the news – even if it has to be invented. In December 2000, journalist Randy Jeffries claimed, in the Weekly World News, that Cayce’s body had been exhumed and his remains DNA-tested. Cayce’s body was, indeed, in the coffin (there had apparently been some doubt), but researchers got a bonus – they found a sheaf of ‘new’ predictions tucked away with the corpse.

They included: a woman president of the USA, a plague of venomous snakes, cures for cancer, horrendously disfiguring new diseases, tidal waves and much more. As the list goes on, the predictions become ever more bizarre; in February 2003, for example, Christ will reappear as a 12-year-old boy floating on a cloud. After a few years of teaching and ministry, says the WWN, He will become a showman, performing resurrections on American TV, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in attendance. Not long after this (perhaps thankfully) the end of the world will occur.