Edgar Cayce, a photographer by trade, and born in 1877 in
Kentucky (USA), is known as the Sleeping Prophet. He is represented today by the Association for Research and Enlightenment.
In a trance state, Cayce gave thousands of “life readings” (over
14,000 documents) for individuals over a forty-three year career. He claimed to be a Christian, read the
entire Bible annually, and served as a Campbellite (Christian Church, Disciples
of Christ) Sunday School teacher.
Those who knew him personally said that he was a gentle, kind, and humble
man. Then, why is he considered to have been a heretic by the vast majority of
Christendom? Reading Edgar Cayce
on Jesus and His Church (1970) will give you a good idea.
The book, by devotee Anne Read, is supposed to give us a
“much truer and more complete understanding of the life of Jesus than the Bible
alone.” To the spiritually and
intellectually awake Christian, this statement is a giant flashing red flag.
The vast majority of the Cayce “life readings” concern
health, massage therapy, and the treatment
of disease states. Cayce, though
possessing only a seventh-grade education, is considered by many to have been
one of the fathers of modern holistic medicine.
In other readings, starting around 1922, Cayce began to
stray significantly from orthodox Christian doctrine. His trance declarations began to include references to past
lives, reincarnation, astrology, Atlantis, Akashic records, the Universal Mind,
spiritual beings, prophecies of the future, and unorthodox declarations about
the nature of God and Jesus.
At first, Cayce himself was concerned about the turn his
readings had taken, but soon, he became convinced he was imparting the truth
to his followers. Edgar Cayce said that he never actually heard his own readings because he was asleep when he gave them. He read transcripts of the readings when he woke up. His initial misgivings about the contents of the readings is obvious from what he said to Arthur Lammers when he awoke from one trance state and read what he had said.
“But what you’ve been telling me today, and what the readings have been saying, is foreign to all I’ve believed and been taught, and all I’ve taught others, all of my life. It ever the Devil was going to play a trick on me, this would be it.” Quoted in Thomas Sugrue, Stranger in the Earth, 1971, p. 210.
The worst deviation from Christianity in the Cayce teachings
concerns who Jesus was. This is
the main point of Cayce’s heresy.
He taught that Jesus was a man, a created soul, a spirit child of God,
who became the Christ. He further
taught that we are also the spirit children of God, the same as Jesus, and that
salvation and enlightenment comes when we realize our true nature and return to
God. This is the New Age doctrine
of the divinity of man mixed in with the ancient heresies of Adoptionism and
Arianism. Both heresies deny the
full deity of Jesus.
One Christian response to Cayce is stated by William J.
Petersen in his book, Those Curious New Cults, p. 46.
“For a good portion of his life, Cayce was a commercial photographer. He understood very well the mechanics of his trade. A blank film is inserted, the shutter is snapped, and then the film is developed in the dark. The nature of a photograph, whether it is a formal family picture or pornography, depends not on the film but on the photographer who uses the cameras. During his trances, Cayce’s mind was like a blank film that would be developed in the dark. I believe that Cayce allowed his camera to get into the wrong hands.”
Petersen is hinting at what many people believe: the person
who was speaking during Cayce’s trance states was not Edgar Cayce, but someone
else, something else. Speaking in traces is a standard event for mediumship and
spiritism/spiritualism. The New
Age teachings of Ascended Masters and spirit guides speaking through human
channellers comes immediately to mind.
The messages given by these spirit guides invariably are at odds with
orthodox Christianity.
What I am about
to say will sound very controversial to some Christians, especially those who
have accepted the anti-supernaturalism of the modernist world view (there it is
again). Unless one accepts that
the spirit guides are who they say they are, they must be someone else. The obvious answer is that they are
Satan himself, or more likely his demons.
The Bible is quite emphatic that Satan and his demons
exist. In fact, Jesus said
so. Either Jesus was ignorant,
mistaken, or correct. I would go
with Jesus.
A detailed Christian Response
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