Edgar Cayce: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) gave thousands of trance readings on health, past lives and prophecy. What he actually taught, the practice he left behind, the failed forecasts, and how his ideas differ from Blavatsky's.

Who was Edgar Cayce and why is he called the sleeping prophet?

Edgar Cayce was an American photographer, born in 1877 near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, who for more than four decades dictated answers to questions while lying down in what he described as a sleep-like state. He died in 1945 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The nickname sleeping prophet comes from the posture: he would loosen his tie and shoes, lie on a couch, and appear to fall asleep, after which a conductor would read a set formula and questions would be put to him. Awake, Cayce had no medical training and a formal education that ended in his teens. Asleep, the voice answering used anatomical and osteopathic vocabulary he did not otherwise use. That gap is the whole basis of his reputation. The label sleeping prophet itself was popularized much later by Jess Stearn's 1967 book of that title, which triggered a wave of paperback interest during the counterculture years and is largely why Cayce is still a recognizable name. Cayce himself was uneasy with prophet framing. He described the readings as available to anyone in principle and repeatedly deflected the idea that he possessed a special faculty.

The life around the readings was ordinary and often precarious. Edgar Cayce worked in bookstores and photographic studios, ran a studio in Bowling Green that burned, married Gertrude Evans in 1903, and raised two sons, Hugh Lynn and Edgar Evans, after losing an infant son. He taught Bible classes. He tried and failed to find oil in Texas in the early 1920s using guidance from readings, a failure his own supporters concede. A hospital built around his work in Virginia Beach opened in 1928 with backing from the stockbroker Morton Blumenthal and closed within about three years when the money evaporated after the crash. A short-lived university project attached to the same circle also collapsed. What survived was the paper. From 1923 onward his stenographer Gladys Davis transcribed sessions systematically, and that archive, rather than any institution he built, is what carried his ideas forward after 1945.

When did Edgar Cayce give his first reading?

Edgar Cayce gave his first documented readings around 1901 and 1902, after losing his voice in 1900. Working with a local hypnotist and later osteopath, Al Layne, Cayce went into a trance and described a treatment for his own throat, then began describing conditions for other people. Layne characterized the state as a self-induced trance producing clairvoyance.

Was Edgar Cayce famous during his lifetime?

Edgar Cayce had modest national visibility in his lifetime, not fame. A New York Times feature in 1910 described him as an uneducated man who diagnosed illness under hypnosis, and Thomas Sugrue's biography There Is a River appeared in 1942. Wider fame came after his death, especially through paperbacks published in the 1950s and 1960s.

How did Edgar Cayce readings actually work?

Edgar Cayce readings followed a fixed procedure that varied little across forty years. Cayce lay down, breathed until his eyelids fluttered, and a conductor, usually his wife Gertrude, read a prepared suggestion aloud that named the person to be helped and their location. Cayce would then begin speaking, often opening with a phrase indicating he had located the body in question. A stenographer, from 1923 almost always Gladys Davis, took the words down in shorthand and typed them up. Questions submitted in advance were put to him at the end. He was then given a suggestion to wake, and he remembered nothing. The procedure matters because it shapes what the archive can and cannot prove. Cayce was not observed under laboratory controls. The subject was usually absent, having written in with a letter that Cayce or his household had already read. Follow-up on whether the recommendations helped was collected by the same people who believed in him. Supporters see a disciplined, unusually well-documented record. Critics see an uncontrolled procedure with obvious channels for ordinary information to reach the sleeping man.

Cayce distinguished two kinds of session, and the distinction is useful for reading the archive. Physical readings dealt with a named person's illness and produced diagnoses and treatment regimens. Life readings, which only began after 1923, described a soul's previous incarnations, its purposes, and the influences it carried. A smaller set covered dreams, business questions, world affairs and what he called ancient mysteries. He offered several accounts of where the information came from, sometimes describing the subconscious mind of the person asking, sometimes a universal record comparable to the Akashic records of Theosophical writing. He did not settle on one explanation, and the readings themselves give more than one. That inconsistency is worth noticing rather than smoothing over: a source that cannot describe itself reliably is a source that has to be judged by its output.

Who wrote down the Edgar Cayce readings?

Gladys Davis, hired by Edgar Cayce in 1923, took down the great majority of the readings in shorthand and typed them up, staying with the work for decades after his death in 1945. Earlier sessions were recorded less consistently, which is why the pre-1923 material is thinner and harder to verify than the later archive.

Could Edgar Cayce remember what he said in trance?

Edgar Cayce consistently reported no memory of what he said while in the trance state, and had to read the transcripts afterward like anyone else. Accounts from his household describe him being genuinely startled by some of the content, particularly the first readings that endorsed reincarnation, which conflicted with his Christian beliefs.

What did the Edgar Cayce readings say about health and healing?

The Edgar Cayce readings treated illness as a problem of circulation, elimination, assimilation and relaxation rather than as a set of named diseases. Roughly two thirds of the archive is medical, and the recommendations are remarkably consistent: spinal manipulation by an osteopath, a diet weighted toward vegetables and away from fried food and pork, castor oil packs over the abdomen, colonic irrigation, massage with oil, electrical appliances he described as radial and wet cell devices, and specific preparations such as an iodine solution marketed as Atomidine. He often advised keeping milk and citrus apart at meals and aiming for a mostly alkaline-forming diet. Cayce presented healing as fundamentally self-repair, with treatment there to remove obstruction so the body could do its own work. That framing, more than any single remedy, is why A.R.E. promotes him as an early figure in holistic medicine. Treat that label as the organization's claim rather than a settled historical judgment. None of the protocols were tested in controlled trials, and several rest on physiological ideas that mainstream medicine does not accept.

The medical material is where the stakes are highest and where caution is not optional. Cayce made specific claims about serious conditions, and people acted on them. Some recommendations are harmless and even sensible by modern standards, such as more vegetables, more water and more sleep. Others, including regular colonics and self-treatment of diagnosed disease, carry real risk. The strongest defense his supporters offer is anecdotal: files of letters from people who reported improvement. The strongest objection is that those files were kept by believers, that no comparison group exists, and that the conditions most often reported as helped are exactly the fluctuating complaints that improve on their own. Anyone drawn to this part of the work should read it as historical folk medicine, not as a treatment plan, and should not substitute it for care from a qualified clinician.

What is the Edgar Cayce diet?

The Edgar Cayce diet emphasized fresh vegetables, especially leafy greens, with a rough target of eighty percent alkaline-forming foods. It discouraged fried food, pork, white bread and combining milk with citrus. Cayce also suggested almonds and grape juice in various contexts. The alkaline-forming rationale he gave does not match current understanding of blood chemistry.

Did Edgar Cayce treat people he had never met?

Edgar Cayce gave most of his physical readings for people he had never met, working from a name and a stated location supplied by the conductor. Supporters treat this remote element as the evidential core of his work. Critics point out that letters describing symptoms usually arrived first, leaving an ordinary route by which information could reach him.

What did Edgar Cayce teach about reincarnation and karma?

Edgar Cayce reincarnation teaching holds that a soul lives many lives, chooses the circumstances it is born into, and meets in this life the consequences of choices made in earlier ones. The topic entered his work abruptly in 1923, when a printer named Arthur Lammers persuaded him to take questions on philosophical rather than medical subjects, and the trance answers affirmed reincarnation and astrological influence. Cayce, a lifelong churchgoer, was reportedly shaken by this and considered stopping. He continued after concluding that the idea did not contradict his Christianity. His version differs from most Indian formulations in several ways. Karma in the readings is less a ledger of punishment than a meeting with oneself: an entity encounters the patterns it built, and the encounter is an opportunity rather than a sentence. Grace can shorten the process. The soul's arc is toward reunion with the divine rather than escape from existence. Life readings routinely traced present-day fears, gifts and relationships to named past settings in Egypt, Persia, Atlantis, Rome or early America.

The practical use Cayce made of this was pastoral rather than antiquarian. A life reading typically told the person what they were good for, what they kept repeating, and what they might do about it, using the past-life narrative as a frame for a character description. Whether the narrative was literally true mattered less to most recipients than whether the description landed. That is also the crux of the skeptical reading: the biographical portraits are unfalsifiable, and they resemble the flattering, broadly applicable character sketches produced by cold reading. A recurring formula in the transcripts holds that spirit is the life, mind is the builder, and the physical is the result, which compresses his whole model. Mind, in this account, is the layer where a soul actually shapes what will show up in the body and in circumstances, so changing habitual thought is the intervention point across lifetimes.

Did Edgar Cayce say who he had been in past lives?

Edgar Cayce's own life readings described several past incarnations, the best known being an Egyptian priest called Ra Ta associated with a healing temple. Others placed him in Persia and in colonial-era America. Critics note the obvious problem: the readings assigned their own source a heroic religious pedigree, which is exactly what an unconscious mind might construct.

How did Edgar Cayce square reincarnation with the Bible?

Edgar Cayce argued that reincarnation was implicit rather than absent in scripture, pointing to passages about Elijah and John the Baptist and to the idea of the soul's pre-existence. Mainstream Christian bodies, including his own Disciples of Christ background, did not accept the reading, and the Christian Research Institute and similar groups still publish rebuttals.

What did Edgar Cayce say about Atlantis and ancient Egypt?

Edgar Cayce Atlantis material describes a technologically advanced Atlantic civilization destroyed in stages, with the final catastrophe placed around 10,000 BC, after which survivors carried their knowledge to Egypt and to Central America. The readings describe an energy device sometimes called the firestone or tuaoi stone, a crystal that concentrated solar power and whose misuse contributed to the destruction. They also describe a long moral conflict between two Atlantean factions, and place many of Cayce's clients as former Atlanteans returning in the twentieth century to face the same technological temptation. Egypt receives even more attention than Atlantis. Cayce dated the Great Pyramid and Sphinx far earlier than Egyptology does, tied their construction to a priest named Ra Ta, and described a Hall of Records concealed near the Sphinx containing Atlantean history, with duplicates in the Yucatan and near Bimini. He indicated the chamber would be found around the close of the twentieth century. No such chamber has been located, and excavations on the Giza plateau since then have not supported the account.

The historical claims here are not marginal to Cayce's system; they are load-bearing, because the life readings depend on those settings being real places. They are also the part of his work that conflicts most directly with evidence. Radiocarbon and archaeological dating place Egyptian pyramid construction in the third millennium BC, not the eleventh, and no geological survey has found a sunken continent in the Atlantic basin. Plate tectonics, established as consensus in the decades after Cayce's death, leaves no room for one. Supporters have responded by reinterpreting the dates as symbolic or by treating the material as describing a spiritual rather than a physical history. That move is available to any prophetic text, and it is worth naming as what it is: a defense that makes the claim untestable rather than one that supports it.

Did Edgar Cayce predict the Bimini Road?

Edgar Cayce indicated that a portion of Atlantis would appear near Bimini in the late 1960s, and in 1968 divers found the linear limestone blocks now called the Bimini Road. Supporters treat this as a hit. Geologists who have studied the formation identify it as naturally fractured beachrock, and the readings described a rising, not a discovery.

Where did Edgar Cayce's Atlantis ideas come from?

Edgar Cayce's Atlantis material closely tracks themes already circulating in nineteenth-century occult and popular literature, particularly Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and the root-race schemes of Theosophy. Martin Gardner argued that Cayce, a heavy reader, absorbed this material and reproduced it in trance. Cayce's defenders deny direct borrowing but cannot rule it out.

Which Cayce predictions came true and which failed?

Cayce predictions have a poor verified record, and honest treatment has to start there. The clearest failures are datable and specific. Readings in the 1930s described catastrophic destruction on the American west coast that did not occur. Later readings described a period of severe earth changes in the last four decades of the twentieth century, including major coastal loss in New York and California and a shifting of the poles around the year 2000, none of which happened. A return of the Christ was indicated for 1998. A widely cited reading pointed to China becoming a Christian nation, and no such transformation took place on the timescale supporters originally applied to it. On the other side, supporters cite readings that appear to anticipate economic collapse before 1929 and disturbance in Europe before the Second World War. These are the harder cases to assess, because the wording is general and the archive is large enough that some statements will match later events by chance.

The methodological problem with scoring Cayce predictions is that nobody has published a complete, blind, pre-registered audit of the archive. Claims of accuracy circulate as selected examples, and selection is precisely what makes a large body of vague statements look prescient. James Randi made this argument directly in a 1979 Skeptical Inquirer article, noting that Cayce hedged with softeners such as saying he felt something might be so, which leaves wide latitude for later interpretation. The counter-argument from supporters is that undated readings should not be scored against a calendar at all, and that the geological material describes tendencies rather than fixed events. That may be a fair reading of some passages. It does not rescue the ones with years attached, and there are enough of those to settle the question of whether Cayce was a reliable forecaster.

Did Edgar Cayce predict the 1929 stock market crash?

Supporters cite Edgar Cayce readings from 1929 that warned of a coming financial disturbance, and treat these as an anticipation of the October crash. The complicating fact is that his principal financial backer, the stockbroker Morton Blumenthal, was ruined in that crash, and the hospital built with his money closed soon after. The guidance did not protect the people closest to it.

Are any Cayce predictions still pending?

Most dated Cayce predictions have now passed their windows, including the earth changes of the late twentieth century and the 1998 return. A few items, such as the discovery of a Hall of Records near the Sphinx, carry no firm deadline and are still treated as open by supporters. Undated claims of this kind cannot be tested, only postponed.

Which books contain Edgar Cayce's teachings?

Edgar Cayce books fall into three groups, and knowing which you are holding prevents most confusion. First, the primary material: the roughly 14,000 transcripts held by the Edgar Cayce Foundation, available on searchable disc and through A.R.E. membership. This is the only source that lets you read a reading in full rather than in extract. Second, the study material drawn directly from the readings, chiefly A Search for God, Books I and II, compiled from sessions given to a Norfolk study group between 1931 and 1942. These twenty-four lessons are the closest thing Cayce left to a practical curriculum. Third, the secondary literature. Thomas Sugrue's There Is a River, published in 1942, is the biography written while Cayce was alive and with the family's cooperation. Gina Cerminara's Many Mansions, from 1950, made the reincarnation material accessible and sold widely. Jess Stearn's Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet, from 1967, drove the paperback revival. Sidney Kirkpatrick later produced a longer archival biography.

The order in which you read these changes the impression you form. Starting with Stearn or Cerminara gives you a curated set of successes and a narrative built to persuade. Starting with the transcripts gives you a much stranger and more uneven body of text, full of dense, sometimes barely parsable sentences, ordinary domestic questions, and readings that plainly go nowhere. The second experience is more useful. Anyone assessing Cayce should also read at least one hostile treatment, such as Martin Gardner's chapter in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science from 1957, which argues that the readings recycle occult literature Cayce had access to. A.R.E.'s own publications are well produced and carefully sourced within their own frame, but they are advocacy and should be read as such.

What is A Search for God about?

A Search for God is a two-volume set of twenty-four lessons drawn from readings Edgar Cayce gave to a study group in Norfolk, Virginia, starting in 1931. Chapters cover cooperation, knowing yourself, setting an ideal, faith, patience and virtue. Group members agreed to live each lesson before moving on, which is why compiling the books took roughly eleven years.

Can you read the Edgar Cayce readings for free?

A portion of the Edgar Cayce readings is quoted freely across A.R.E.'s website and in secondary books, but the complete indexed archive sits behind membership or a purchased database. Extracts circulating online are frequently trimmed or stitched together, so a passage that seems startlingly specific is worth checking against the full transcript before you rely on it.

What Edgar Cayce practice can you try this week?

The most usable Edgar Cayce practice is setting an ideal, the exercise at the center of A Search for God, and it takes about thirty minutes to start. Take a sheet of paper and rule three columns headed spiritual, mental and physical. In the spiritual column write one word or short phrase naming what you actually want to live from. Cayce's readings pressed people to choose something they could commit to rather than something impressive. Then, in the mental column, write the attitudes that would follow if that spiritual ideal were real for you, framed as states of mind rather than tasks. In the physical column, write the concrete actions and relationships that would express those attitudes this week. Keep the sheet where you will see it, and each evening mark one line where your day matched the chart and one where it did not. Cayce's claim was not that the sheet produces results by itself. It was that most people act from ideals they have never made explicit, and that writing them down makes the mismatch visible enough to correct.

Two additions from the readings make the exercise more substantial. The first is the morning practice the original study group adopted: they agreed to sit in silence at the same hour in their own homes, beginning with a short affirmation from the lesson they were working, then holding attention on it without arguing with whatever thoughts arrived. Ten to twenty minutes is enough. The shared timing was deliberate, and if you can arrange it with one other person it changes the character of the habit. The second is a dream record. Cayce gave a large number of readings on dreams and treated them as the ordinary channel through which guidance reaches people who are not in trance. Keep paper by the bed, write whatever fragment survives waking, and after two weeks read the entries together looking for repeated figures. This costs nothing and commits you to no metaphysics.

How long does the Cayce ideals exercise take to work?

The Edgar Cayce ideals exercise gives useful information within a week, because the gap between what you wrote and what you did becomes obvious quickly. A.R.E. study groups traditionally revisit the chart monthly and expect the spiritual column to change rarely and the physical column often. Treat it as an ongoing audit rather than a goal-setting exercise with an endpoint.

Do you need to be in a trance to use Cayce's methods?

No part of Edgar Cayce's practical teaching requires a trance state. The readings advised meditation, prayer, dream recording and applied self-examination for ordinary people, and Cayce's own instruction to the Norfolk study group was that they had to live the lessons rather than pursue psychic ability. Attempts to self-induce trance for guidance are not something the material recommends.

What are the main criticisms of Edgar Cayce?

Criticism of Edgar Cayce is substantial, well documented, and comes from several directions at once. Martin Gardner, writing in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science in 1957, argued that the readings blend technical osteopathic vocabulary with folk remedies and that their occult content traces to books already in circulation. James Randi called Cayce's record far weaker than advertised and attributed his reputation to followers who recorded successes and explained away failures. Michael Shermer made the related point that a voracious reader with limited formal schooling can assemble impressive-sounding material without any paranormal source. Joe Nickell has noted that the parapsychologist Joseph B. Rhine, no hostile witness to psychic claims, found a reading given for his own daughter notably inaccurate, and that Cayce on occasion gave a physical reading describing a living body for someone already dead. There is also the legal record: Cayce was arrested in 1931 on a fortune-telling charge that was dismissed, and again in Detroit in 1935 for practicing medicine without a license, which ended in probation.

The deepest objection is structural rather than about any single failure. Cayce was never tested under controlled conditions, and the archive as it stands cannot separate genuine anomalous knowledge from information that reached him by ordinary means. Subjects wrote in describing symptoms. Assistants included medically trained people. The transcripts were kept and interpreted by his own circle. Even the famous case of his wife Gertrude's lung illness, cited as a hit, contains details about the spine that were not correct and were not counted as misses. Christian critics raise a separate objection, arguing that the reincarnation and Atlantis material is incompatible with the orthodox teaching Cayce claimed to hold. Both critiques deserve room. A reader can find the man sincere, which most critics do, and still conclude that the readings are not evidence of anything beyond an unusual mind.

Was Edgar Cayce ever caught faking a reading?

No documented instance of Edgar Cayce being caught staging a reading exists, and even hostile critics such as James Randi generally treated him as sincere rather than as a conscious fraud, though Randi did use fraud language at times. The skeptical case rests on unconscious construction, ordinary information channels and selective record keeping rather than on exposed deception.

Why do skeptics call Cayce's health advice dangerous?

Skeptics including Karen Stollznow argue that Edgar Cayce's remedies were folk treatments with no demonstrated efficacy, and that the real harm lies in people delaying effective care. The readings did often advise consulting physicians and osteopaths, which mitigates the charge somewhat, but the archive is not a safe substitute for diagnosis and was never validated in any trial.

How is Edgar Cayce different from Helena Blavatsky and other trance teachers?

Edgar Cayce differs from Helena Blavatsky most sharply in method and in ambition. Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society decades before Cayce began, produced long systematic works such as The Secret Doctrine, presented as transmissions from living adepts and framed as a complete cosmology set against Christianity. Cayce produced no system at all. He answered one person's question at a time, mostly about a sore back or a failing business, and the cosmology has to be assembled from thousands of fragments by later editors. He also stayed inside Christianity rather than positioning himself against it, which is why his material spread through American churchgoing households in a way Theosophy never did. The overlap is real: Atlantis, root civilizations, an akashic record and cyclical incarnation all appear in both, and Gardner argued the resemblance is borrowing rather than convergence. Compared with Jane Roberts, who from the 1960s dictated the Seth material in a similar trance format, Cayce is far less philosophically ambitious and far more practical, and his archive is dominated by medical rather than metaphysical content.

The limits of Cayce's approach follow from the same features. This is not a path with instructions in the way that Kriya yoga or Zen practice is; the readings assume a Protestant devotional life already in place and add to it. Someone looking for a technique will find only meditation, prayer, dream work and the ideals chart, all of which exist in fuller form elsewhere. Anyone hoping for evidence of survival or psychic capacity will find an archive that cannot deliver it, because it was never built to. And anyone with a serious medical condition is in the wrong place entirely. What Cayce does offer is a specific and unusually pastoral framing: that a person's difficulties are material they chose to work with, that mind is where the work happens, and that the practical test of any ideal is what you did on an ordinary Tuesday.

How did Edgar Cayce influence later teachers?

Edgar Cayce shaped the American holistic health movement, the popular Atlantis genre and the past-life therapy field that grew from the 1970s onward. The physiotherapist Harold Reilly built a practice around Cayce's massage and hydrotherapy suggestions, and A.R.E. study groups seeded local networks that later fed the New Age publishing boom of the 1980s.

Is Edgar Cayce closer to Neville Goddard or to Blavatsky?

Edgar Cayce sits closer to Helena Blavatsky in content and to neither in method. Neville Goddard taught a single mental technique with no trance, no diagnosis and no ancient history, holding that imagination creates reality. Cayce shares Blavatsky's Atlantis and akashic furniture but delivered it unconsciously and piecemeal, in service of individual health questions rather than a doctrine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Edgar Cayce a Christian?

Edgar Cayce identified as a Christian throughout his life. He was raised in the Disciples of Christ tradition, taught Sunday school and Bible classes for decades, and told visitors he was not a spiritualist. The readings on reincarnation caused him personal difficulty precisely because he had to square them with the church teaching he already held. His resolution was that reincarnation was compatible with the Gospels rather than a replacement for them, a position most of his own denomination rejected.

How many Edgar Cayce readings are there?

The Edgar Cayce readings number roughly 14,000 transcripts, given between about 1901 and 1944 and preserved by the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Each is indexed by a case number for the person and a sequence number for the session, so a single individual may have dozens. The great majority are physical readings dealing with illness. Life readings covering past incarnations form a smaller set, mostly given after 1923.

Did Edgar Cayce ever charge for readings?

Edgar Cayce did take money for readings at several points, notably during his partnership with the homeopath Wesley Ketchum around 1910 to 1912. After the Association for Research and Enlightenment was incorporated in 1931, readings were formally given to members rather than sold to the public, an arrangement that also reduced exposure to fortune-telling statutes. Cayce was never wealthy, lost money on a Texas oil venture in the early 1920s, and depended heavily on donors.

What is the Association for Research and Enlightenment?

The Association for Research and Enlightenment, usually shortened to A.R.E., is the nonprofit Edgar Cayce founded in 1931 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to study and preserve his readings. It survived him and still operates, running study groups, a library, conferences and a publishing arm. A sister body, the Edgar Cayce Foundation, holds the original transcripts. Sources published by A.R.E. present Cayce sympathetically, so treat them as advocacy rather than neutral history.

Did Edgar Cayce predict the end of the world?

Edgar Cayce did not predict a final end of the world, but the readings do describe a period of severe geological upheaval, including coastal destruction in the United States and a shifting of the poles, loosely dated to the closing decades of the twentieth century. He also spoke of a return of the Christ around 1998. Neither the upheavals nor the return occurred as described, which is the single strongest evidential objection to the prophetic side of his work.

Are castor oil packs an Edgar Cayce idea?

Castor oil packs were not invented by Edgar Cayce, but he recommended them so often that they are now associated with his name. The readings suggested saturated flannel laid over the abdomen with heat applied. Castor oil packs were already in circulation as a folk remedy before Cayce. Clinical evidence for the practice is thin, and anyone with a diagnosed condition should treat it as comfort care rather than treatment and speak to a doctor.

Who is the best modern writer on Edgar Cayce?

There is no single authoritative modern writer on Edgar Cayce, and readers get the clearest picture by reading across the divide. Thomas Sugrue's There Is a River gives the devotional account with access to the family. Sidney Kirkpatrick's later biography is more distanced and archival. On the skeptical side, Martin Gardner and James Randi set out the standard objections. Reading only one camp produces a distorted view in either direction.