The Story of Edgar Cayce: There Is a River

Edgar Cayce came to be known as the "father of holistic medicine" and the founding voice of alternative spirituality. The Sunday Times of October 9, 1910, profiled the Christian mystic and medical clairvoyant in an extensive article and photo spread headlined "Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized". At the time, he delivered daily trance-based medical readings in which he would diagnose and prescribe natural cures for the illnesses of people he had never met. By the time of his death in January 1945, Cayce had amassed a record of more than 14,300 clairvoyant readings for people across the nation, with many of the sessions captured by stenographer Gladys Davis. In the 1920s, Cayce’s trance readings expanded beyond medicine (which nonetheless remained at the core of his work) to include “life readings,” in which he explored a person’s inner conflicts and needs. In these sessions, Cayce employed references to astrology, karma, reincarnation, and number symbolism. Other times, he expounded on global prophecies, climate or geological changes, and the lost history of mythical cultures, such as Atlantis and Lemuria. Cayce had no recollection of any of this when he awoke, though as a devout Christian the esotericism of such material made him wince when he read the transcripts. Contrary to news coverage, Cayce was not illiterate, but neither was he well educated. While his knowledge of Scripture was encyclopedic, Cayce’s reading tastes were somewhat limited, but he did spend several early years as a clerk in bookstores, but never did write any of the books that bear his name, he had a son named Edgar and many others that assembled his readings into popular form along with a bevy of independent authors. Thomas Sugrue (1907–1953) was a widely respected and world-travelled print journalist who wrote for many of the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Herald Tribune and The American Magazine. Born in Connecticut on May 7, 1907, Sugrue discovered the work of psychic Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) when he roomed with Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, at William and Lee College in Virginia. Sugrue later sought medical help through Cayce’s channeled readings, and went on to become both Cayce’s biographer and a lifelong supporter. Sugrue’s There Is a River appeared in 1942 (he revised it in 1945) and was the sole biography written of Cayce during his lifetime. The book popularized Cayce’s work in alternative healing and channeling, and became a founding document of New Age spirituality. Sugrue died in New York City on January 6, 1953.