13 - At Last, Atlantis

Just as man has gazed fascinated into the sea, atavistically peering into his past, so has he engaged in a restless quest for Atlantis. In the ocean, said naturalist Rachel Carson, he found from whence he had sprung, and in Atlantis, a dream of a superior culture, prefacing the brief few thousand years of recorded history with which he measures his meager progress.

Since Plato first described the Lost Continent of the Atlantic twenty-five hundred years ago, more than two thousand books have been written about a legendary land that nobody has seen. There have been books to prove Atlantis, books to disprove it. Some have been by erudite scientists, others by dreamers in search of a Shangri-La.

While oceanographers, geologists, and ordinary sea-divers have been fanning out over the Atlantic for centuries in the underwater quest, Edgar Cayce merely went to sleep, and saw visions of a magic continent which went through three periods of breakup, the last some eleven or twelve thousand years ago.
 

Waking, Cayce didn’t know anything about lost continents and when his first mention of Atlantis was called to his attention, he rubbed his eyes and said in that gentle way of his,

“Now I wonder where that came from, and if there’s anything to it?”

At various times, Cayce’s Atlantis, just like Plato’s Atlantis, boasted a technical culture, which eventually deteriorated to a point where the last denizens were victims of their own destructiveness. Cayce’s readings on Atlantis, continuing for a span of twenty years, were given before the first atom bomb was touched off, before it was known that man finally did have the power to blast himself back to the Dark Ages, or turn the clock back to the Stone Age and life in a cave by bleak campfire.

Could it be that it had all happened before?

“If we believe in evolution,” the Geologist pointed out, “then we must believe in some sort of superior society existing before our skimpy recorded history, since obviously we haven’t come very far since the time of Moses, Plato, Aristotle, or Christ.”

There was an anthropological gap, from about seven thousand to thirty thousand years ago, when anything could have been possible for all we know. Whole cities and successions of cities had been buried before, as many different layers of Troy revealed—so why not a whole country or continent? From magnetic grains, from fossil remains, from layers of earth crust, we know the earth goes back millions of years, and yet we have no certain knowledge of what happened only yesterday, geologically.

• Had some cataclysm, destroying most or nearly all of humanity, also destroyed the records of that humanity?

• And could it not happen again, at presumably any time, now that man had the weapons of his own destruction at hand?

• Or perhaps the tilt of the global axis, sending billions of tons of melting glacial ice down on us from the Pole, would suffice?

Cayce’s and Plato’s Atlantis corresponded in many details, though Cayce had never read the two dialogues, in which the greatest mind of antiquity passed on the story of the island empire beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Cayce had seen three periods of destruction, the first two about 15,600 B.C., when the mainland was divided into islands, and the last about 10,000 B.C., when a group of three large islands, along with some lesser, were swallowed up overnight, as Plato had suggested. Though the precise outlines of Atlantis, before its breakup into the islands mentioned by Plato, were never given in a Cayce reading, he indicated that it extended from what is now the Sargasso Sea area in the west to the Azores in the east, and compared its size to “that of Europe, including Asia in Europe; not Asia, but Asia in Europe.”

Before the last holocaust, waves of Atlanteans had, according to Cayce, dispersed in all directions, accounting for the superior, and often strangely familiar cultures, in such diverse areas as Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Central America, and in our New Mexico and Colorado, where they presumably became a colony of mound-dwellers.

Before the final breakup, which centered near the Bahamas, the culture of this superior people, eroded by greed and lust, had disintegrated to a point, Cayce said, where their destruction, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah after them, was inevitable.

Cayce even gives us a picture of the destruction, which Plato doesn’t.

“With the continued disregard of those that were keeping all those laws as applicable to the Sons of God, man brought in the destructive forces that combined with those natural resources of the gases, of the electrical forces, that made the first of the eruptions that awoke from the depth of the slow-cooling earth, and that portion now near what would be termed the Sargasso Sea first went into the depths.”

Cayce says cryptically that archives dealing with the existence of Atlantis, concealed in three areas of the world, will eventually be revealed: one of these areas is Egypt, where the ancient Egyptian priests assured the Greek lawmaker Solon, the source of the Plato tale, that they had the account fully preserved.
 

Of course, since Plato’s story has been discounted through the centuries, even his reference to a continent—clearly North America—beyond the Atlantean islands being disregarded as part of an allegorical myth, it is hardly likely that the same breed of historians and scientists would heed an unlettered clairvoyant dipping into his subconscious to elaborate on one of the most engrossing tales ever told.

Even the Geologist, gradually committed to Cayce and his wonders, found it hard to swallow Atlantis at first. But after delving into the scientific research of others, he began his own research, taking him at one point to the waters around Bimini, where Cayce forecast that the first of the sunken remnants of Atlantis would dramatically reappear. As the Geologist investigated, the scientific evidence began piling up.

If Cayce was right in his clairvoyant medical cures, why shouldn’t he be right about other things? The information was certainly coming out of the same bottle, so to speak. Cayce had observed that the lowlands of the Continent of Atlantis, before this presumed breakup into islands, paralleled the present Atlantic seaboard, and the Geologist pointed out that ocean troughs parallel to New England, seventy to a hundred miles at sea, showed from their ancient sedimentation that they had once been above surface.

And what of the mid-Atlantic submarine ridge, spectacularly rising in spots, as it may once have dropped?

“Sedimentary material from a depth of two miles on the ridge, revealed the exclusive presence of fresh water plants,” the Geologist noted, “evidence that this section of the ridge was once above sea level.”

Curiously, as recently as 1966, there was some confirmation of a gently sloping plane extending into the North Atlantic, and scientists at the Oceanographic Institute at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, theorized it was a likely abode of the earliest humans in this continental area some twenty thousand years ago. However, oriented as they were, they visualized this slope as easternmost North America, not westernmost Atlantis.

To some, the Azores, eight hundred miles due west of Portugal, represent the eastern marches of the last of the Atlantean islands. And they have been acting up lately, just as their counterparts may have once before.

Recent activity in the nine islands of the Azores is a striking reflection of the instability that may have dropped Atlantis in the Atlantic thousands of years ago. Quiet for centuries, the Azores began erupting in 1957, curiously close to the year 1958, which Cayce saw as the forty-year beginning of large-scale breakups around the globe.

As perhaps with Atlantis, the 1957 quakes and volcanic eruptions created migratory waves, as they broke up islands and destroyed thousands of homes. In February of 1964, there was another four days of nightmare quakes, and thousands of refugees fled the isle of Sao Jorge, hard hit by a thousand tremors.

The ‘57 quake recalled early scenes described by Cayce. The Geologist picked up a report by one of the refugees, Bernadette Vieira, who with her family fled Sao Jorge and settled in Santa Clara, California.

Bernadette’s experience was most graphic:

“She ran screaming down the village street as a volcanic island arose from the sea between Sao Jorge and nearby Fayal Island.“

On that day the earth shook, and stone-walled houses toppled. Hundreds of persons were killed. Hot ashes fell like rain. Crops were ruined, and livestock was killed.

“The volcanic island sank back into the sea as quickly as it had risen.”

In the ‘64 quake, panicky residents feared the tremors might activate two dormant volcanoes on either tip of Sao Jorge.

“The ground is trembling almost continuously,” a Portuguese news agency reported, “the people of Sao Jorge feel like shipwrecks on a raft.”

In one community of thousands, only three houses were left standing. Telephone and telegraph communications were cut. The air smoldered with sulphur fumes. A hastily assembled flotilla carried doctors, ambulances and blood plasma to the stricken island in response to the SOS:

“Important damages. Many ruins. Request all navigation available in proximity proceed southern coast this island render assistance.”

There was more:

“If the volcanoes erupt,” the Geologist read aloud, “they could split the island and cause it to crumple into the sea.”

The Geologist brought out a map, showing how the Azores archipelago, strangely scattered in mid-ocean, stretched for four hundred miles, with its chain of craggy coastlines, volcanic mountains, crystal-clear crater lakes and lush subtropical vegetation. Whatever a mainland had in fresh water, fauna and flora, these islands surrounded by seawater, also had, plus a legacy of volcanic instability.

“Could it really be,” I asked, dubiously pointing to the loop of rocky isles, “that this was once Atlantis?”

The Geologist shrugged.

 “Why not? What’s left is due west of the Pillars of Hercules, where Plato fixed the original islands. Geologically, where any phenomenon occurs in the present, it also occurred in the past, as part of normal evolutionary change. All that had to vary was the degree of change. Instability is an obvious feature of that area.”

The Azores have caught the fancy of even the Russians.

“In 1963,” the Geologist pointed out, “a leading Russian geologist, Dr. Maria Klionova, reported to the Academy of Science of the USSR that rocks had been dredged up from depths of 6600 feet, sixty miles north of the Azores, which gave evidence of having been exposed to the atmosphere at approximately 15,000 B.C. — just about the time Cayce fixed for the breakup of the Atlantean mainland.”

Similar evidence had turned up long before.

“In 1898,” the Geologist said solemnly, “the crew of a ship laying underwater cable near the Azores was grappling for a line in water two miles deep. As the grappling hooks scraped the ocean bottom, they turned up unfamiliar particles of lava, which from its peculiar glassy structure could only have solidified in the open air.”

Reflecting the instability of the ocean bed in this area, a British freighter reported sighting a steaming volcanic island just south of the Azores before the turn of the century, but the island had disappeared before geologists could get back to it.

On a smaller scale than Atlantis, land has dramatically vanished in various parts of the world.

“In 1883,” the Geologist noted, “the island of Krakatoa, near Sumatra, blew up with a loss of thousands of lives. In 1916, Falcon Island, east of Australia, disappeared without a trace, reappeared in 1923, then disappeared in 1949.”

The floor of the ocean often rears up violently.

“After a 1960 earthquake had leveled the Moroccan town of Agadir,” the Geologist noted, “soundings revealed that nine miles offshore the sea bottom had buckled up 3300 feet in one great convulsive thrust.”

In August 1923 the Western Union Company, searching for a displaced cable, discovered that the Atlantic floor had risen two miles at one point since the last soundings twenty-five years before.

Cayce’s Atlantis broke up into five islands, the three largest being Poseidia, Aryan, and Og. His most striking prediction concerned Poseidia. For in June 1940, as noted by the Geologist, he made a forecast that should soon materialize, if he was clairvoyantly on the beam.

“And Poseidia,” he said, “will be among the first portions of Atlantis to rise again. Expect it in sixty-eight and sixty-nine [’68 and ‘69]. Not so far away.”

And where to expect it? The Geologist had the clue in still another Cayce reading.

“There are some protruding portions that must have at one time or another been a portion of this great Atlantean continent The British West Indies or the Bahamas, and a portion of the same that may be seen in the present, if a geological survey would be made, notably in the Gulf Stream through this vicinity, these [portions] may yet be determined.”

Eagerly the Geologist combed through scientific literature on the geology beneath the Gulf Stream. Rather wide-eyed, he read of a submerged stream valley 2400 feet below the waves between Florida and the Bahamas, of giant sinkholes submerged six hundred to nine hundred feet off the tip of Florida, of mysterious bumps picked up by depth sounders in the Straits of Florida. The bumps appeared about the size of homes; only these “houses,” if they may be called that, are two thousand feet below on the ocean floor.

Geology appeared to be getting ready for Atlantis.

“Before Cayce’s death in 1945,” the Geologist said, “the scientific assumption was that the ocean basins were huge bathtubs into which detritus [debris from disintegrating rock] was sluiced for many eons. However, through a new instrument, a sub-bottom depth profiler, it has been discovered that in great areas, the accumulation of sediment is remarkably small, especially on portions of the ridges, as would happen if there had been continents very recently where the ocean floor is now.”

Current research confirms relatively recent sinkings of large land areas near Florida and the Bahamas. The National Fisherman featured an article, “Huge Sunken Piece of Florida Identified South of the Keys,” referring to a 1300 square mile plateau submerged south of the Florida Keys. Geologist L.S. Kornicker described a submerged chain of islands and lagoonal basin ten miles south of Bimini in the Bahamas, at depths of forty to fifty feet

Whatever happened occurred at the approximate time of the Atlantis debacle.

“Kornicker suggests,” the Geologist said in a bemused voice, “that the features of the submerged area were formed eight thousand or more years ago when sea-level was about forty-eight feet below its present level.”

With some excitement the Geologist stumbled upon an obscure Cayce reading discussing how the Atlanteans constructed giant laser-like crystals for power plants.

“The records of the manners of the construction of same,” he read, “are in the sunken portions of Atlantis, where a portion of the temples may yet be discovered, under the slime of ages of seawater, near what is known as Bimini, off the coast of Florida.”

Columbus reading about the continent beyond the Pillars of Hercules could not have been more excited than the Geologist reading about Bimini, presumably a residual of the western perimeter of Atlantis. There was no rest now, until the Geologist could organize an underwater party to make soundings off Bimini. After extensive preparation, he found himself flying sixty miles due east from Miami to Bimini. The pilot of his seaplane, learning of the mission, excitedly told him of large clumps of rock visible on his daily run at a certain angle.

From the pilot, the expedition got the general location of two of the more conspicuous clumps. Scuba diving in the crystal, azure-blue waters north of Bimini they came upon a scattered pile of limeen-crusted granite boulders, each about five to fifteen tons. Their spirits soared, but they fell again. The rocks were rough-hewn and looked as though they had come from a quarry. And they had. A ship carrying granite ballast had been driven on the shoals and wrecked thirty years before. But our scientists weren’t that easily discouraged.

They changed course, tacking in thirty-five-foot depths southeast of Bimini, and after two fruitless days, they saw on its side in the coral sea a beautiful round white pillar about sixteen feet long. Could this be one of the pillars of the sunken temples of Atlantis, suddenly exposed in relatively shallow water by an upward thrust of the seafloor? Examination of a pillar fragment revealed that it was of purest marble. But it still could have been washed off the hulk of a battered freighter.

The Geologist realized—reluctantly—that it would take another expedition, armed with heavy salvage equipment, to raise the column and determine its origin. Still, the party made a number of depth-borings, which the Geologist tantalizingly refuses to discuss until their message can be clarified, perhaps in the very near future, when Poseidia, or some part of it, would rise again—Cayceites hoped. Meanwhile, what evidence was there that a highly civilized man lived from 7500 to 30,000 years ago, dispersing over wide areas from a central base?

In the Pueblo Valley, southeast of Mexico City, the Mexican anthropologist Juan Armenia Camacho turned up pieces of bone decorated with carved figures, estimated at thirty thousand years.

“These bits of bone,” the Geologist stressed, “indicate that civilized man was in the New World much before anybody believed, except for Cayce, who put the flesh where Camacho put the bones.”

Mexico is alive with a tradition of age-old visitations by a gifted people from the East; this led the pyramid-building Aztecs to be on the lookout for a returning White God, and made them vulnerable to the blandishments of Spanish Conquistador Hernando Cortez and his rapacious horde. Almost every native group in Central and North America have inherited stories of ancient floods, with formidable landing parties arriving from the East.

In Mexican lore, the Geologist pointed out,

“there is a record of an early landing from a land called Aztlan, apparently an ancient variation of Atlantis. The Mayan Book of Chilan Balam, a record of this advanced culture, gives a detailed account of a great catastrophe to the East.

The Delaware, Sioux, and Iroquois tribes have a legacy of a great flood, and the almost extinct Mandan Indian of Missouri held special memorial services about a great war canoe, symbolizing the ark which traditionally brought their forebears from the East during a Great Flood.”

The press was always from the East.

“Curiously,” the Geologist said, “none of these visitors or invaders were from the West, always the East, always the Atlantic.”

He looked over at me innocently.

“Have you heard of the Welsh legend in which a small bird rides on the back of a larger one as it attains great height, and then flies higher when the larger bird becomes tired?”

I shook my head.

“Well, the Iroquois have exactly the same folk tale.”

The Geologist had assembled many indications of a central source of civilization on both sides of the Atlantic—and Atlantis.

“We all know about the great pyramids of Egypt,” he said, “but how many know that the archeologists have been digging up even more extensive pyramids of similar design in Mexico?”

He plucked from his bulging files a commentary of ancient civilizations in the Americas, from the New York Times in December 1961, author William Luce noting:

“Thirty-two miles from Mexico City is an archeological site so old that even the Aztecs knew virtually nothing about it. This is Teotihuacan, the site of the Pyramid of the Sun. A ruin five hundred years before the arrival of Cortez, the pyramid has been reconstructed into a structure as tall as a twenty-story skyscraper. The 216-foot climb to its top is a fine way to end a tour of ancient Mexico. ... Never excelled in Mexico as architects and engineers, the Teotihuacans also were master sculptors and painters.”

The author posed the great enigma.

“The ruins raise as many questions as they answer. Who the people were who built them, where they came from, why they built them and what happened to them are questions that will be luring scholars and tourists for some time.”

The Geologist had marshaled his evidence. On both sides of the Atlantic were almost identical calendars more accurate than those developed in Europe for hundreds of years.

“The accuracy of the mathematical calculations, as reflected in both the architecture and astronomy,” the Geologist pointed out, “was equally remarkable in both Egypt and the early Mayan civilizations.”

In the Yucatan, in southern Mexico, in Peru, were landmarks of a culture that was old when the conquering Spaniards arrived.

“Pizarro and his men found two thousand miles of well-paved road in Peru, along which were dotted remains of many fine hotels. Where did they come from?”

There was an amazing similarity of place names; for example, names of five cities in Asia Minor about the time of Christ, and five cities in Central America:

• Asia Minor

  • Choi

  • Colua

  • Zuivana

  • Cholima

  • Zalissa

• Central America

  • Chol-ula

  • Colua-can

  • Zuivan

  • Colima

  • Xalisco

The Geologist frowned as I compared the brief lists.

“The important thing to remember, is that the New World communities were already named when the first European explorers arrived.”

In studying the Cayce readings, the Geologist saw nothing about Atlantis inconsistent with what had been adduced from the ocean floor, common artifacts on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Plato account.

“According to Cayce, Atlantis was one of the oldest land areas, also one of the places where man first made his appearance. The early continent occupied the greater part of what is now the North Atlantic, and our present Eastern seaboard was then the Coastal region, as were parts of Europe. At the time when the poles shifted, and Lemuria in the Pacific was submerged, the Atlanteans were achieving great technological advances.

 

Several thousand years later, misuse of the laws of natural power caused a stupendous upheaval that split the continent into five islands. The major Atlantean mass plunged into the Sargasso Sea in this first cataclysm. The remaining populace continued to deteriorate until, finally, eleven thousand years ago or so, Nature seemed to rebel at the iniquity, and the remaining islands were swallowed up in the last of the giant cataclysms.”

Cayce mentioned Atlantis originally in November 1923, in an early life reading originally dealing with a previous incarnation.

“Before this,” he said, “the entity was in that fair country of Alta, or Poseidia proper, then this entity [the subject] was in that force that brought the highest civilization and knowledge that has been known to the earth’s plane. This, we find, was nearly ten thousand years before the Prince of Peace came.”

Cayce’s description of the last breakup differed from Plato’s in the implication of what the large-scale mass movements were all about. Plato’s source saw the Atlantean migration as part of a great invasion, repulsed by an Athenean military that could hardly have coped with a major power. More plausibly, the Cayce version implies that the Greeks drove off a group of stragglers, just one of the many homeless contingents island-hopping their way to new homes.

The first wave of migration, in the second breakup, may explain the Basques, a hardy race of unknown origin, and unrelated language, living in the mountain fastnesses of northern Spain.

“With this,” said Cayce, “came the first egress of peoples to that of the Pyrenees.”

It was so long ago that all connections with a motherland were gradually eradicated.

“Later, we find the peoples who enter into the black, or the mixed peoples, in what later became the Egyptian dynasty, also those peoples that later became the beginning of the Inca, that built the wall across the mountains, and with the same those of the mound-dwellers.”

Into agrarian Egypt, the newcomers may have carried the arts of medicine, embalming and architecture, and fanning out in the opposite direction, carried the fruits of their culture to Central America and Peru, where the early natives, like the first known Egyptians, mummified their dead.

The first Atlantean disturbances or upheavals came twenty-eight thousand years ago, but not till 17,600 B.P. (Before Present) was the continent actually broken up.

“What would be considered one large continent,” Cayce said, “until the first eruptions brought those changes, producing more of the nature of large islands, with the intervening canals or ravines, gulfs, bays, or streams.”

Structurally speaking, it wouldn’t have taken much to change the face of the Atlantic. Only a slight warping of the earth’s crust—barely one-eight thousandth of its diameter— could have caused large portions of the ocean floor to rock to the surface, while larger portions sank. The upheaval affecting the continental land mass was visualized as the unhappy result of a merger of destructive man-made forces with those of nature, as might happen if a powerful nuclear bomb were to upset the equilibrium of the earth in the area of a major fault. By current standards, it must have been indeed an advanced civilization that could blow itself up.

If one is to believe Cayce, the misuse of solar energy brought about the debacle. And there is evidence, the Geologist reported, to support the idea that man was sufficiently advanced technically to utilize the etheric or cosmic rays of the sun as a primary source of power.

“Very ancient maps of Greenland and Antarctica have been found, showing these areas in an unglaciated state,” the Geologist pointed out, “and the experts think that ancient cartographers, from the subtle rise and fall of its mountain topography, might have mapped the area from the air.”

As a factor in harnessing the power of the sun, Cayce mentioned a firestone whose magical power apparently resembles the laser beam, which was not produced for some thirty years after the Cayce reference. The sleeping Cayce’s description of the stone reminded the Geologist of the power generated by filtering the rays of the sun through the ruby.

The concept would have been dismissed as fanciful until recently.

“The activity of the stone was received from the sun’s rays,” Cayce said. “The concentration through the prisms or glass acted upon the instruments that were connected with the various modes of travel [trains, ships, etc.], as the remote control through radio vibrations or directions would in the present day.”

The firestone, or ruby of its time, was housed in a dome-covered building with a sliding top. Its powerful rays could penetrate anywhere; just as the laser beam, it could be either a death ray or a constructive energy source.

It was hard to conceive that which Cayce put into words:

“The influences of the radiation that arose in the form of the rays were invisible to the eye but acted upon the stones themselves as set in the motivating forces, whether aircraft lifted by gases or guiding pleasure vehicles that might pass along close to earth, or the crafts on or under the water.”

All over Atlantis, stations were set up to produce this power, then something inadvertently went wrong and the breakup followed.

“These, not intentionally, were tuned too high and brought the second period of destructive forces, and broke up the land into the isles where later there were further destructive forces.”

Cayce gave a detailed description of the stone source of all this energy:

“A large cylindrical glass, cut with facets in such a manner that the capstone made for the centralizing of the power that concentrated between the end of the cylinder and the capstone itself.”

As Plato suggested, the collapse came with a disintegration of moral values.

Cayce describes the last days:

“As cities were built, more and more rare became those abilities to call upon the forces in nature to supply the needs of bodily adornment, or to supply the replenishing of physical beings as hunger arose. There was a ‘wasting-away’ in the mountains, the valleys, then the sea itself, and the fast disintegration of the lands, as well as of the peoples, save those that had escaped into those distant lands.”

It seemed incredible that so advanced a people could go hungry and lack for clothes. The Geologist smiled wryly.

“Think of the millions starving today all over the world—India, China, Russia.” He mused a moment. “And if our population keeps up at the present rate, we may have our own food problems in another fifty years. As it is, our big deal, domestically, is the anti-poverty program, and we’re the richest country in the world.”

In one of Cayce’s trance recalls, the Geologist saw not only indications of Atlantis, but of Cayce’s gift of prophecy. Cayce had picturesquely described a meeting in 50,000 B.C. of many nations on Atlantis to deal with hordes of huge beasts then overrunning the earth. These beasts, said Cayce, were ultimately coped with by “sending out super-cosmic rays from various central plants.” It sounded like the sheerest fantasy.

But Cayce had made one tangible statement subject to scrutiny, in 1932:

“These rays will be discovered within the next twenty-five years.”

Marking time, in 1958 the Geologist turned to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and found two references to recent discoveries of potential death rays.

Only the year before, experimental physicists at the University of California had reported a successful effort to produce anti-neutrons.

“With the discovery of the anti-neutron,” the Encyclopaedia reported, “also came the theoretical possibility of a source of energy hundreds of times more compact than any previously existing. Anti-neutrons could in principle be combined with anti-protons to build up ‘antimatter.’ When antimatter came into contact with ordinary matter all of its mass would be converted into energy rather than only a fraction of it, as is the case with nuclear fission and fusion reactions.”

It seemed extremely complicated.

“Not at all,” said the Geologist with a smile. “The anti-neutron beam passes over you, and you become a mass of invisible energy.”

The process was not reversible.

But there was another ray, more in keeping with the fire-stone described by Cayce. The radiating force was,

“achieved by storing up energy in a small insulating crystal of special magnetic properties, so that the crystal passes on more energy than it receives.”

In other words, the laser. And already, as suggested by Cayce, the ruby has been used as the crystal to convert matter into boundless energy, by amplifying light waves from the sun.

Despite the “evidence,” the Atlantis material appeared too fanciful to be true. Since Cayce tuned in on the collective unconscious, perhaps he had somehow tuned in on some delightful fable concocted by some inventive or capricious mind.

“It was real in somebody’s mind, and so it became equally real in Cayce’s subconscious,” I suggested.

The Geologist shook his head.

“That won’t wash. Otherwise, Cayce would have been guilty of producing every false medical diagnosis ever made by some confused practitioner; diagnosis, whatever it was, was certainly real to that mind projecting it.”

Even climatically, Cayce apparently knew what he was talking about when he looked back those “10,600 years before the Prince of Peace came into the land of promise.” Yucatan, a haven for the fleeing Atlanteans, had a different climate then.

“For rather than being a tropical area, it was more of the temperate, and quite varied in the conditions and positions of the face of the areas themselves.”

It was this sort of thing that reassured the Geologist about Cayce’s unconscious insight.

“The major climatic change that led from the cold glacial climate to the present earth climate occurred close to 11,000 years ago,” he observed complacently.

“A study of pollen from cores taken from the Mexico City region more southerly than the Yucatan, establishes that the area was once cooler and dryer than now.”

He turned to Cayce’s description of the physical changes in the area.

“In the final upheaval of Atlantis, much of the contour of the land in Central America and Mexico was changed to that similar in outline to that which may be seen in the present.”

The Geologist had an explanation for this, too.

“This means that since migration took place before the final upheaval altered the Gulf of Mexico to its present outline, these migrations must have been to points at present subsided in the Gulf.”

He turned back to Cayce again.

“The first temples erected by Altar and his followers were destroyed at the period of change in the contours of the land, those of the first civilization following have been discovered in Yucatan but have not been opened.”

This hardly seemed likely. But the Geologist wasn’t so sure. Almost casually, he said,

“We might have this evidence of Atlantis if we could only understand the significance of unique stones discovered in Yucatan back in 1933.”

Cayce had apparently foreseen the archeological activity that would turn up some relic of the gigantic firestones that the Atlanteans had used for a seemingly unlimited power source. “In Yucatan there is the emblem of same,” the sleeping Cayce had said.

And as if to guide archeologists to the stones, he cautioned,

“Let’s clarify this, for the pattern may be the more easily found. For these pattern stones will be brought to the United States. A portion is to be carried to the Pennsylvania state museum. A portion to be carried to the Washington museum or to Chicago.”

It may only be coincidence, but in November 1962, Fate magazine reported,

“Three elaborate, sealed Mayan tombs over two thousand years old have been discovered by University of Pennsylvania museum archeologists on the Yucatan Peninsula of Guatemala.”

Atlantis was obviously not legendary to the man who put it on the map—Plato.

“The brilliant, sophisticated mind that conceived The Dialogues and The Republic,” the Geologist observed, “was the same that referred plainly in the Timaeus to the mighty power which was aggressing against the whole of Europe and Asia.”

Writing four centuries before Christ, Plato was dealing with a reality that was anything but obscure, the nameless fear of the Atlantic beyond the protective Strait of Gibraltar. He referred to an impenetrable Atlantic which not even the hardiest mariners dared brave, for fear of being mired, until a series of intrepid navigators set out for India two thousand years later. Not only Solon told the story of Atlantis.

Socrates, too, had given a similar account, Plato recalls, “by some coincidence not to be explained.”

Obviously, Plato thought it more than coincidence.

In the Timaeus, Plato mentioned the repulse of the invading Atlanteans. In the Critias, named for his grandfather, to whom Solon reported, he describes the legendary Atlas, as the first king of Atlantis. The Atlantean story, the Egyptian priests said, had been set down “in our sacred registers as eight thousand years old.”

As Solon lived about 600 B.C., that would put the final destruction between ten and eleven thousand years ago. Like other peoples, the ancient Greeks had a legend of a cataclysmic Noah-like flood. From their archives, safely sealed in some pyramid perhaps, the Egyptians remembered many such disasters.
 

The Atlantic itself indicates Greek influence, Atlanticus being the Latin for the Greek, Atlas. Plato again casually picked out something which confirmed his reliability, the reference to the “continent” beyond the Atlantean Islands.

“Obviously,” the Geologist pointed out, “he was referring to a continent we all know well—North America.’

Perhaps, reading his Plato, Columbus got the idea that beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond the Atlantis of Plato, he would find the true continent, which could only be India, for what other continent was there?

It might be pertinent to briefly review the Plato story, beginning with the Egyptian priest advising Solon:

“As for those genealogies which you have recounted to us, Solon, they are the tales of children. You remember one deluge only, whereas there were many of them. You do not know that there dwelt in your land the noblest race of men which ever lived, of whom you and your whole city are but a remnant. This was unknown to you, because for many generations the survivors of that destruction died and made no sign. For there was a time, Solon, before the greatest deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens, was first in war and was pre-eminent for her laws, and is said to have performed the noblest deeds and had the fairest constitution of any.

“Many wonderful deeds are recorded of your State in our histories. But one exceeds all the rest. For these histories tell of a mighty power which was aggressing against the whole of Europe and Asia. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island in front of the straits which you call the Pillars of Heracles. The island was larger than Libya and Asia [Asia Minor] put together, and was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent [America] which surrounded the true ocean. For this sea [Mediterranean] which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbor, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land [America] may be most truly called a continent.

“Now in Atlantis there was a great empire which ruled over the whole island and several others, as well as over parts of the continent [America], and, besides these, they subjected parts of Libya as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. The vast power gathered into one endeavored to subdue our country and yours and the whole of the land which was within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth magnificently, for she was first in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes.

And when the rest fell away from her, forced to stand alone, after having undergone the extremity of danger, she triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those not yet subjected, and liberated all the others dwelling within the limits of Heracles. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods. And in a single day and night of rain all your warlike men sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared beneath the sea. And that is why the sea in those parts is impenetrable, because there is a quantity of shallow mud in the way, caused by the subsidence of the island.”

In still another dialogue, Plato gives a colorful description of Atlantis:

“And there were temples built and dedicated to many Gods, also gardens and places of exercise, some for men, and some for horses. There was a race-course a stadium in width, and in length extending all round the island for horses to race in. Also there were guardhouses at intervals for the body-guard, while the most trusted had houses within the citadel, and about the persons of the kings. The docks were full of triremes and naval stores, and all things were quite ready for use.

“For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, the people were obedient to the laws, practicing gentleness and wisdom in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, thinking lightly of gold and other property, which appeared only a burden to them. Neither were they intoxicated by luxury, nor did riches deprive them of self-control. They saw clearly that worldly goods are increased through friendship with one another, and that by excessive zeal for them, the good is lost and friendship perishes.

 

By such reflections of a divine nature, all that we have described increased in them. But then this divine portion began to fade away, and they, unable to bear their good fortune, became unseemly, and began to appear base. Yet to those who had no eye for true happiness, they still seemed blessed at the very time they were bursting with unrighteous avarice and power.”

With the statement that this wickedness had apparently angered the Gods, the Plato fragment broke off, presumably lost in the shuffle of the years. Undoubtedly, the greatest philosopher of his time had little idea of what he was stirring up with his tale of a Lost Continent, but Cayce was another matter. After portions of Atlantis rise, said Cayce, then comes a period of upheavals that “must in the next generation come to other lands.”

That reading was in December 1943, and Webster defines a generation as the period when “father is succeeded by child, usually taken to be about thirty-three years.”

And so in another ten years, in 1976, Atlantis may no longer be a mystery. And the Geologist? He wants to be around Bimini when fresh land surfaces, or will it be the Azores?

Time - and Cayce - may yet resolve one of the more intriguing riddles of man’s past.
 

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14 - Reincarnation

The expression “down-to-earth” was coined for Eula Allen. She came from the State of Washington, where she once bred and raised horses. She had married and raised a family, and was a grandmother several times over. She lived in a big comfortable house with her husband, retired Naval Commander Harold Allen, farmed the fields around her house, counseled friends far and wide, and wrote about the things that Edgar Cayce had once planted in her consciousness.

I had an immediate sense of ease with her, the feeling of relaxation that comes with knowing, intuitively perhaps, that one is meeting an honest human being. Her blue eyes twinkled brightly through clear panes of glass, a friendly smile formed on her lips, she gave me her hand, and the clasp was as dry and firm as a man’s.

I stole a look around the room as she guided me to a comfortably upholstered chair. It was oversized, yet warm, with a warmth that came together from many sources—the jars and bottles of every color and description, glinting in the sun that slanted through the windows, the burnished woodwork whose merging grains seemed vitally alive, the books and magazines sprawled colorfully across tables and chairs. It was the living room of people who obviously enjoyed living. Eula, I presumed, was in her sixties, but she was the ageless type, who would be as sprightly in mind and spirit ten years from now as she had been ten years before.

She was tall, with a straight back, and a direct demeanor. It seemed hard to believe that anybody so down to earth could believe in the esoteric.

“Was it Edgar Cayce who convinced you of reincarnation?” I asked.
She laughed out loud. “Edgar Cayce saved my life,” she said with emphasis.
“Is that why you accepted reincarnation?”
“Not at all,” she said easily, “Mr. Cayce never forced his beliefs on anybody.”

I wondered how she had met Cayce.

She smiled.

“Like so many other people, I imagine. I was tired, rundown, a bag of bones, I could hardly get around. I was forty-two at the time, had recently had a baby, my husband was at sea, and I came down with an acute kidney infection. The doctors at the Norfolk naval hospital told me the kidney would have to be removed, and when I refused surgery they said they wouldn’t take responsibility for what happened.”

She was living in a furnished room at the time, and a friendly landlady had introduced her to a woman who had regained her health through a Cayce reading. That woman, Mignon Helms of Virginia Beach, had never been ill a day since.

Eula had an adventurous mind, and the thought of healing force operating through the unconscious mind of a stranger intrigued her.

“I knew enough of life to know that there was no limit to the power of the mind, and for that reason perhaps I had refused surgery, feeling that it wouldn’t get at the real difficulty, and yet would leave me maimed.”

She had had an experience of her own with her son Bruce, that made her ready for any form of mental healing. Fifteen years before, Bruce, then twelve, had been critically ill with rheumatic fever. The pulsing of the heart could be heard across the room. Eula had never considered herself religious. Her family was among the first white settlers between Walla Walla (Washington) and Lewiston (Idaho), and there had been no church background.

But as the boy lay on the table, she prayed. She visualized God, and she visualized a perfect heart, keeping the picture of that perfect heart in her mind all through the ordeal. The crisis came, as the doctor watched grimly, and then the boy’s breathing suddenly grew less labored, his temperature dropped, and he relaxed into normal slumber.

The doctor stood up with a tired sigh.

“I don’t know how,” he said, “but hell make it” Eula hesitated. “I prayed, Doctor, do you think it helped?”
He looked at her curiously. “I can’t think of anything else that helped,” he said. “You saved that boy’s life.”
And so what Cayce did made sense to Eula Allen.
After Mrs. Helms got through her description of how Cayce had helped where the doctors had failed, Eula asked, “When can I see this man?”
“You must ask for an appointment,” Mrs. Helms replied, “but you don’t have to see him. Just say where you will be at the appointed tune.”
Eula Allen blinked. “But I would like to be there,” she said, finally.

The reading was fixed for the 18th of February, 1941, with Mrs. Helms present, along with Gertrude Cayce and the inevitable Gladys Davis.

The sleeping Cayce never once mentioned the infected kidney. He said that Eula was anemic, running on nervous energy, and described a strain and heaviness in the lumbar and sacral areas, the region of the kidney, an aching that extended up to the mid-back.

“In these areas of the nervous system, there are engorged or enlarged ganglia [nerve centers from which impulses are transmitted], and these, rather sore to the touch, spread into the muscular areas of the body.”

The organs themselves were sound, except as they were lacking stimulation from a blood deficiency due to impeded central nervous impulses.

“Hence, the organs are not diseased but at times dis-eased.”

He recommended small quantities internally of olive oil, three pellets of Adiron daily, one with each meal, and the use of an electric vibrator before bedtime for a half hour, along the spine, especially over the areas of the neck and head, between the shoulders, and across the ninth dorsal vertebra, through the lower lumbar and sacral areas.

Even though the treatment seemed sketchy, Eula Allen found a strange confidence in the man who let her out the door with a kindly smile and warm handshake. “I’ve known you before,” he said, squeezing her hand gently.

Back in her room, Eula reviewed her last medical report. The kidney was swollen to the size of a small cantaloupe, and her general health depleted. The condition had been chronic for fifteen years, periodically recurring, but acute now for six weeks. Pain in the back intense, temperature high.

Surgery recommended.

But she put her faith in Cayce, and the electric vibrator. In three days, the kidney swelling was reduced to normal, and she was out of pain. She continued the treatments, and in six months gained forty pounds. She hadn’t felt this well since she was twenty-five. And she kept remembering, oddly, what Cayce had said, “I’ve known you before.”

In time, her curiosity got the better of her, and she wanted to know what he meant. It was strange, but she had had the same feeling about him. And so for the first tune, really, sitting down, chatting with Cayce, she heard about reincarnation.

“Does that mean,” she asked with a worried frown, “that I may come back as an animal?”

Cayce laughed.

“Certainly not, that’s transmigration, and you may not even have to come back at all, if you become perfectly developed in this life.”

Even with the confidence she had in the amazing healer, it was hard for her to get used to the idea of reincarnation. Cayce didn’t press her. She attended his Bible classes and listened.

“The soul is eternal,” he said, “and God’s arm isn’t short. You go out and you come in again.”

Reincarnation involved only highly developed human souls, not animals. For more than a year she thought it over, then decided to have one of Cayce’s life readings. These were designed to delineate past lives, which had most influenced this one, revealing attitudes, inclinations, and personalities presumably carried over from earlier existences in different bodies. Although the Cayce health reading had convinced her of his subconscious link to the Universal Mind, reincarnation was still a difficult thought, even for one believing in survival, and Eula wasn’t sure of that, either.

Eula discovered, as Cayce spoke, that she had had previous sojourns in Ireland, Rome, Syria, Peru, Atlantis, (where so many sojourned) and in our own Wild West before the Civil War. But what interested her most at this time, she being of a practical turn, was the insight into her own temperament as seen through these so-called incarnations.

“The material appearances have been quite varied,” Cayce said, “yet very sincere, very stern in most activities. Thus, the entity is qualified to interpret almost any phase of the individual experience, and others will listen.”

With a secret smile, I recognized that I had chosen Eula as an interpreter of the Cayce record, and had listened avidly, if somewhat confused, for hours. I had been much impressed at the same time by her openness and candor, amused by her two-fisted characterizations of some of the trustees of the Cayce legacy. They would not have been so amused.

Cayce, even more amusingly, had warned Eula.

“The entity should be guarded not as to what it would say or as to whether it would say, but as to what and how and when it says. Just remember that others listen and recall, ‘Ye shall give an account of every word that is spoken.’ For in speaking thy words are given power.”

I could vouch for Eula’s eloquence, but obviously this was no reflection of reincarnation. But she had still -other distinctions.

“The entity may be expected to be associated with many who have had, or will have much to do with the changing of policies, local, state, national and international.”

That seemed quite an order for a grandmother, even one as articulate as Eula.

I looked up from the life reading which Eula had put before me.

“I see where you’re running your own State Department.”

She regarded me rather sharply, but said nothing.

“Are you actually advising the Great Powers on the problems of the day?” I smiled. “People from all over the world come to my home—India, China, Washington, but who they are and what is a private matter.”
A thought struck me. “Why, if people have lived other lives, don’t they remember anything from them?”
“But they do,” she said. “It’s just sometimes that they don’t remember that they are remembering. Jesus said, ‘I’ll bring all things to thine remembrance,’ but he didn’t say how.” Despite the subject matter, she still gave the impression of being down to earth.
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“Well, Mr. Cayce mentioned that in an Irish incarnation I was a Rosa O’Deshea, who came to the New World at an early period.” She looked at me calmly. “Though I have no Irish strain in me genetically, I have always felt terribly sentimental about Irish music, poetry, and folk tales. Also, the privations I went through in coming to this country stood me as good experience in the rough ranch life in Washington State in this life.”
I like Irish music, too, particularly “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” without any tangible link to the Ould Sod.
“You’ll have to do better,” I said.

Eula’s eyes flashed, and she said with some asperity, “I don’t have to convince you of anything.”

I peered into the reading. “It says here that the ‘entity should be guarded, not as to what it would say or as to whether it would say, but as to what and how and when it says.’” “That’s right,” Eula said.
“But what good is it all, the life reading or a belief ha rein-carnation, except for the pleasant euphemism that death is not the end?”

Again an expression of exasperation crossed Eula’s normally benign countenance.

“Remembering, even subconsciously, teaches us; it provides opportunities for us to go on and learn.”

Speaking of a sojourn which carried the entity—so both Cayce and I thought of Eula—from Palestine, where she studied at the feet of the Apostles to bondage in Persia, the mystic had related:

“From that sojourn there are great latent talents as a teacher, a leader, an instructor, a director. All of these abilities are a part of the entity’s present experience. Yet, there was so little of the home life in that sojourn. It was for that the entity returned in the present experience.”

Certainly, Eula had been a good homemaker, married twice comfortably, four children, the last born to her when she was forty years old. The children were grown, the two girls marrying well, one son a lawyer, the other an engineer. As a housewife, her cup runneth over. Had she done any teaching?

She hadn’t stopped teaching, in class and out, even with all her household functions. It still seemed a most trivial basis for proving out reincarnation.

“Weren’t you ready to accept reincarnation when Edgar Cayce’s health reading led to your cure?”

“It certainly made me more amenable. If his subconscious was right, where the professional medicos’ conscious was so wrong, why shouldn’t this selfsame subconscious be equally accurate and the professional theologians equally wrong?”

But this had only predisposed her, she insisted, to giving the whole subject an honest, open appraisal.

“What sense does anything make,” she said, “unless we are here to learn?”
I shrugged. “Many would argue that it makes no sense.”
“Everything else does,” she shot back, “all life has a rhythm and plan, the seasons, vegetation, the movement of the tides and the planets. There is an order about everything, so why not man? And certainly the integral part of man is not his body, but his spirit.”

I again invoked the anatomist, who had opened up a cadaver, and asked his students to pick out the soul.

Eula sniffed. “That man was a fool. I could point at the same body, and ask, ‘Is this the man we knew?” Without spirit and mind, he is only a slab of meat, and even the doctor would admit man is more than that.”
Yes, Eula was sure she remembered, and remembering, made progress. In her life reading, she had asked, “What is the meaning of the pulling sensation in my fingers and hands?” “These,” Cayce replied, “should come more from the tendencies that are a part of the experience, the writing, see?”
Ah, Eula was to be a writer.
“I always felt an inclination that way, and Cayce told me that I should get myself published.”
Even for an established writer, this was often more easily said than done.
But Cayce was determined.
“How can I best apply my understanding for the benefit of others?” she had asked.
“Put it on paper, and publish it.”

And what had been published?

Two books had already come out of Eula, based on the knowledge of the universe she had gained from the Cayce readings. One was Before the Beginning, a summation of the spiritual creation; the other, The River of Time, of physical creation as visualized by Cayce. The books had been received only perfunctorily by the Cayce press. But, surprisingly, they were now so popular they could hardly be kept in stock.

It made some things clear about herself that she had never understood before. As a child, upset by the gambling of ranch-hands on her grandfather’s spread, she had boldly broken up the games, barging in on the players and destroying every pack of cards she could get her hands on. Now, she understood why. She was reacting from having once been a dance hall shill. Subconsciously, at least, she was remembering, and trying to do something about it.

Still, I wondered how deep this belief in reincarnation cut.

“Are you afraid to die?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Death is like stepping out of an old car, into a new one.”
“Then why were you so concerned about your son’s possible death of rheumatic fever?” “I didn’t believe in reincarnation then, and besides, even now, I would be deeply affected by the suffering of anybody I loved, not necessarily by their death, if I thought they had learned something in this life before they went.”
How about all the innocents—children—that Stalin and Hitler exterminated? Why should they have suffered?”
“It makes no sense unless you do accept reincarnation, for then one accepts the law of compensation, karma, carrying over from one life to another. Edgar Cayce frequently spoke of people paying in one life for that done in another, profiting equally from the good they had done. In one of my previous lives, as a Roman, Cayce said that I commanded a fleet manned by galley slaves. Even before my reading, every time I saw a picture of slaves, my stomach would turn over. It stirred up all kinds of unconscious memories. Now it makes sense.”
“I still don’t understand all this suffering as being part of God’s will.” She looked at me sharply. “God sets up certain laws defining the order of the universe, and these can’t be changed.”
“But certainly God is more merciful than a mere sinner, who would not want anyone to suffer.”
“God’s law cannot be changed,” she said.
“Then why pray for your son?
“We have access to God’s law, and the way things shape out depends on our own attitudes in accordance with this law.”

Ironically, for a reincarnationist like Eula, God’s law represented virtually the same thing to detached scientists, an endless cycle of matter and energy, capable of entering into an endless variety of physical combinations in perpetuity.

“We are all part of God,” she said, “and God is part of us. There is no conflict, no punishment, merely opportunities to develop.” She looked up at me with a disarming smile. “Why should everything we have had so much trouble experiencing be taken from us, when nature is so economical in other respects?”

There was no questioning Eula’s sincerity, and if her belief in reincarnation helped her be a better, more productive person, that was a plus sign indeed for reincarnation.

“Why do you now find it so important to believe in reincarnation—wouldn’t being just a good Christian, believing in the message of God through Christ be sufficient to get you into Heaven?”

She gave me an almost pitying glance.

“Don’t you know that Christianity embraced reincarnation for three hundred years, until the Roman influence expunged it after the Emperor Constantine recognized the Church? What do you think the early Christians were thinking of when they asked Christ whether he was Elijah, who had come before? They were thinking of reincarnation, that’s what.”

Her mood changed suddenly, and she regarded me with a concerned air.

“If you thought of reincarnation as rebirth, I think you could understand it better. Just as the earth has a constant rebirth so does the spirit. Don’t you remember Christ saying that ‘Unless man is reborn again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven’?”
“Wasn’t that a reference to baptism?”
Eula threw up her hands. “Christ was not interested in show but substance, that is at the heart of everything he said or did.”

It seemed time to get back to earth.

“In one life,” I said, “you lived in the good old U.S.A., and rather recently, which is quite a shift from all these glamorous lives in Persia, India, Palestine, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Atlantis, lives with no possible way of being checked out.”

“First of all,” Eula said, “let’s get things straight. As a soul develops, the chances are that development will be faster in advanced cultures, and since Cayce only dealt with meaningful past lives, he drew on lives in growth-making civilizations.”
“So what did you learn in the Wild West?” I asked.
She snorted. “See for yourself.” She pointed to a well-worn copy of the life reading spread out before us.

“Back in the Gold Rush days, on the Barbary Coast, I was a dance hall girl, even a prostitute; I guess.”

Cayce had put it quite picturesquely.

“The entity was in the earth when there were those Journeyings from the East to the West—Gold! In ‘49 the entity, with its companions, journeyed to the Western lands. Hardships were experienced on the way, yet the entity was among those associated in those acts with those in their relationships to such conditions—rowdiness, drink, spending. Yet the entity was one to whom many, many came for counsel.”

As in her Irish life experience, Eula had a specific identity.

“The name then was Etta Tetlow. Records of these may be found in some of the questioned places in portions of California, even in the present.”

Then came the provocative conclusion, “In activities, with all types of that early land did the entity have connection.” I had seen no specific reference to a dance hall experience, prostitution, or the Barbary Coast for that matter.

Eula smiled.

“Well, that last remark would appear to speak for itself. What kind of woman deals with every kind of man?”
“How about Etta Tetlow—dance hall girl?”
Eula gave me a sly smile.
“Three years ago, in 1963, I was in California doing some lecturing on Cayce—Pacific Grove, I believe—when a woman sauntered up and said, ‘Hello, Etta.’”

Eula winced. She had never been able to stand that name, Etta.

Somehow, in a book on reincarnation, Eula’s incarnation as Etta Tetlow had been brought to the woman’s attention. Browsing one day through colorful old posters, she found some dating back to the boisterous days of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco. The posters listed the entertainment at one of the local dance halls. One name stood out—Tetlow.

Eula did not take this incarnation lightly. Even before this report of an Etta Tetlow in California, she was concerned by the shadiness of her past-life past Troubled, she sought out the waking Cayce.

“If I was a prostitute,” she said, “how could I ever hope to touch the hem of the Master’s robe?” It occurred to me that the Master, so generous to shiners, could hardly have minded. But Eula apparently thought he might Cayce received her gently. “Why so concerned? You know better now, don’t you?”

He pressed her hand.

“Make it a stepping-stone, instead of a stumbling block. We come back to learn.”

Eula’s main purpose in this life, Cayce had said, was to build a family, and she looked proudly on her thirteen grandchildren scattered around the country. One was top man in his Air Force group, another had won rare distinction scholastically as a naval architect, still another was a champion swimmer. The son with the pulsing heart had taken his heart through World War II.

He, too, had been skeptical about reincarnation, and still might be, for all Eula knew. When he was twenty-two, before going off to war, his skepticism had driven him to a life reading. Cayce correctly forecast he would be a lawyer, but said his job in this life, because of his karmic past, was to prevent people from getting into trouble, not sitting in judgment on them. He had gone against this precept, becoming a county prosecutor in northern California, and then things had started to go wrong in his life.

Eula was a bit vague on what had gone wrong.

“It’s his life,” she said, “and I don’t like to get too personal with it”
“Didn’t the public like him as prosecutor?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, they even wanted to put him up as judge.”
“Then what went wrong and how did it relate to his becoming a prosecutor?” I looked at her rather curiously. “After all, somebody has to be a prosecutor, so it can’t be all that wrong.” She laughed. “Yes, but somebody else may have reached a different point of advancement from past experiences.”

At any rate, she had recalled the Cayce reading to her son while he was debating the judgeship.

“You know,” she said darkly, “you were told never to sit in judgment.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I know,” he said.
“Then you know what to do.”

He turned down the post.
And what had happened to his life since?

“Both personally and professionally it started to get back where it had been. He was now heeding the law, the Divine law, which Cayce had interpreted for him.”
Just as she and Cayce shared the feeling they had known each other in the hazy past, Eula felt she had been acquainted with me. “I was in some sort of supervisory capacity with you then.” “You still are, at this point,” I said.
She smiled. “Haven’t you felt at ease, as though we’ve been through some experience together?”

As a matter of fact, I had been drawn to her instantly, but put it down to the curious empathy we do seem to have for some people at sight.

“But what is that,” she said, “but a vaguely remembered past?”
Again I saw no evidence. “Don’t you think the life we live now is the one that counts, even if there is reincarnation?” I had chanced across a sentence in Life is for Living by Eric Butterworths “’The life you once lived can only be found in the life you now express.’”
“Naturally,” Eula agreed, “but if there is a Cayce around to show you the twist in the road, that is all the better.”

At first glimpse, reincarnation had seemed wishful thinking on the part of those shrinking from the apparent oblivion of death. Before the glory of the Resurrection, the concept of reincarnation was not a difficult turn in the spiritual road to everlasting life. My own faith in the moral lesson of Christ was implicit; yet, like others, I found myself shying from the implicit message of rebirth.

Yet, had not St. John quoted Him, in a statement parenthetically absolving all on earth of guilt in the Crucifixion?

“Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.”

He had power to take it up again. And what He did, others could do with the Father’s help. Was that not the message of Christ—that, and a cry for universal love, mocked through the ages? Had Edgar Cayce, as his readings suggested, trod the bitter road with the Master, absorbing a message that made his own gift possible, as all gifts were made possible, with God’s acquiescence?

Was Cayce’s unique gift, scorned as Another’s had been scorned, a stepping-stone in the ultimate revelation of what life was all about? Were the truths in his miraculous healing manifested to bring credence to the broader spiritual truth of purposeful life? Did Cayce’s subconscious, merging with the Universal Consciousness that was the Father, Creator, and Creation, come along at a time when a troubled world, stifling in the limited horizons of materiality, was ready, even eager, for some sign of its place in a universal plan?

There was nothing accidental, nothing left to chance in the Creator’s grand design; so Cayce believed as he pictured reincarnation as an instrument, not an end in itself.

“Each and every individual,” he said once, “follows out that line of development in the present earth plane as it has received from the preceding conditions, and each grain of thought or condition is a consequence of other conditions created by self.”

It was difficult for me, as for others, to conceive of a spirit with a volition of its own. How did the spirit find its way to another body, where did it rest and restore itself, why did it keep coming back?

“Must each soul continue to be reincarnated in the earth until it reaches perfection, or are some souls lost?”

That was the puzzler put to Cayce.

Cayce had a ready answer.

“The soul is not lost; the individuality of the soul that separates itself is lost. The reincarnation or the opportunities are continuous until the soul has of itself become an entity in its whole or has submerged itself.”

“If a soul fails to improve itself, what becomes of it?”
“That’s why the reincarnation, why it reincarnates; that it may have the opportunity. Can the will of man continue to defy its Maker?”

Constantly, Cayce minimized the ego, aware that many cultists mistakenly became enveloped in grandiose past lives at the expense of this one. Like Butterworth, he felt the past could only be expressed in the life lived now, otherwise no life became important. ‘The real purpose, as should be for each soul, is the message of love of the Savior for the children of men.

That phase of Christian experience [reincarnation] is questioned by many, yet there is this period when the fact needs stressing to answer many questions. But that this is to be the primary fact—reincarnation—no. That is merely the plan as He demonstrated.” Believing in Cayce—and reincarnation—Cayce’s followers were constantly inquiring whether he would come back, in what guise and how soon.

One corporate lawyer, who had made a fortune astutely following the Cayce readings dealing with real estate and finance, had tried to establish some arrangement whereby Cayce, on his slated return in another body, could profit through the clairvoyant gains he had achieved for the lawyer in this life. The slumbering Cayce seemed cool to collusion of this sort. Others queried Cayce about his next sojourn, after reading a newspaper article describing how a reincarnationist had attempted to leave this money to himself after death.

The article revealed the utter frustration of the reincarnationist’s plan, oddly reminiscent of a scene from the Broadway musical, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever:

“Arthur M. Hanks, who made a fortune peddling flowers in the Los Angeles financial district, left no will because he believed he would return through reincarnation, and claim his life’s savings. He has been dead seven months now, and today Judge Joseph P. Sproul opened the way for relatives to divide the flower peddler’s $100,000 estate.”

With this springboard, intimates of Cayce put the question to his Universal Consciousness:

“You will give at this time information which will help us to understand the laws governing the selection by an entity of time, place, race, color, sex, and the parents at any rebirth into the earth plane, especially the possibility of Edgar Cayce, present in this room, bringing through in his next incarnation memory of this life.”

Then came the stickler.

“If possible we would like to be advised as to how proof of such memory can be established by leaving a record or money now that may be called for during the next appearance.”

Cayce examined each phase of the question. The times of reincarnation—or rebirth—varied, according to the development of the entity, and “as to the manner or the character of the removal from the material experience. As to race, color, or sex, this depends upon that experience necessary for the completion, for the building up of the purposes for which each and every soul manifests in the material experience.

One incarnation naturally merges into another. ‘As the tree falls, so does it lie,’ saith the Maker and Giver of life. So does the light, so does the nature of an individual. For the beginning in the next experiences are ever tempered by how sincere the purpose was of the entity in the experience before. For indeed, as has been given, whatsoever ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Just as a leaf fell prematurely, so could human life be cut off.

“They who have done error suddenly, they who are advanced, they who have not met a whole expression, may go suddenly, as you count time.”

I was rather disappointed, as Cayce’s following may have been, in his failure to program a future of his own. If he could see for others, why not for himself?

“As for the entity Edgar Cayce,” I read finally, “this depends then as to when that experience has been reached in which the union of purposes of entities in materiality has created that expression, that phase, to which the entity’s development may reach to find expression through same.”

As for the time of his return, Cayce was vague.

“It may be perhaps a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, a thousand years, as you may count tune in the present. For how gave He? The day no man knoweth, only the Father in heaven knoweth, and it is provided you so live, as He gave, that ‘I may sit upon the right hand and my brother upon the left.’”

Ostensibly, the session had produced little of practicality. I could almost sense the disappointment of Cayce’s audience in the next question. “Would you suggest any way that a record may be left by an entity?”

Cayce got to the heart of the matter, playing on a word to discard one point and make another. “By living the record,” he stressed. For as one lived deeply, developing spiritually, so he developed the faculty of remembering.

“For when the purposes of an entity are the more in accord with that for which the entity has entered, then the soul-entity may take hold upon that which may bring to its remembrance what it was, where, when, and how. Thinkest thou that the gram of corn has forgotten what manner of expression it has given? Think thou that any of the influences in nature that you see about you—the acorn, the oak, the elm, or the vine, or anything—had forgotten what manner of expression? Only man forgets.”

And why just man?

“Only in His mercy such was brought about. As in Adam they forgot what manner of men they were. For ‘God’s Book of Remembrance’ may be read only by those in the shadows of his love.”

As he did in the conscious, Cayce showed no interest subconsciously in the prospect of money in this life or another, and coolly disregarded this as incentive to remembrance.

“It was almost,” a witness said, “as though he were refusing to participate in any little game of clairvoyance, as he had once refused to submit to the tests of psychic researchers intent on reducing his gift to their own meager measurements.”

Cayce’s own remembrance was remarkable. His references to Atlantis, Lemuria and other lost civilizations could be dismissed as speculative, but other phenomena could not be so easily scouted. He frequently lapsed into languages that were clearly recognizable—French, Italian, Spanish, German, and others that were unrecognizable.

These ventures into tongues he had no knowledge of in the waking state were triggered by the subject matter or subjects. Once he read for a man in Italy, who had deputized a friend here to sit in on the reading. The friend, of Italian extraction, asked a question, and the answer came back in fluent Italian. Another time, reading for a German, Cayce branched off into idiomatic German, bespeaking ultimate knowledge of the Teutonic.

Cayce clearly had not responded to the satisfaction of his friends as to the nature of his next return. However, in a dream a short tune before, he had visualized himself as being born again, and gave tune and place. As happened so often La his life, a significant dream came during a great emotional crisis. He had been arrested in Detroit for “practising medicine without a license,” and had been subjected to the ignominy of public trial as a charlatan.

On the train back to Virginia Beach, he had one of his most singular dreams. He had been born again in A.D. 2100 in Nebraska.

“The sea,” he recalled, “apparently covered all of the western part of the country, as the city where I lived was on the coast. The family name was a strange one. At an early age, as a child, I declared myself to be Edgar Cayce who had lived two hundred years before. Scientists, men with long beards, little hair and thick glasses, were called in to observe me.

They decided to visit the places where I said I had been born, lived and worked, in Kentucky, Alabama, New York, Michigan, and Virginia. Taking me with them the group of scientists visited these places in a long, cigar-shaped metal flying ship which moved at high speed.

 

“Water covered part of Alabama; Norfolk had become an immense seaport New York had been destroyed either by war or an earthquake and was being rebuilt. Industries were scattered over the countryside. Most of the houses were of glass. Many records of my work as Edgar Cayce were discovered and collected. The group returned to Nebraska taking the records with them to study.”

There were other dream details. In one city, virtually completely destroyed, Cayce stopped to ask the workmen where he was. They looked at him in surprise, and to his surprise, replied, “New York.” From this dream many have fashioned a dreary prophecy of ultimate doom, pointing out that Cayce’s prediction of gathering destruction from 1958 to 1998 implied that this was only the “beginning” of holocausts that were to continue indeterminately.
 

However, Cayce was not quite so pessimistic. Interpreting his own dream, he likened his period of personal trial to the tests that others would face, rocked with doubts of the ultimate purpose of the Creator.

“And the vision was that there might be strength, there might be an understanding, though the moment may appear as dark, though there may be periods of misinterpreting of purposes.”

And there could well be, he indicated, challenging times for mankind. But in the end, was a promise given in the Bible.

“Though the very heavens fall,” Cayce paraphrased, “though the earth shall be changed, the promises in Him are sure and will stand—as in that coming day—as the proof of thy activity in the lives and hearts of thy fellow man.”

Cayce himself, in the conscious state, found support for reincarnation in the Bible, though modern theology spurned it “Reincarnation has so long been considered a part of the eastern religion,” he said once, “that we have cause to consider it foreign to Christianity. However, I doubt if anyone who has really studied the Bible could say that it was not contained in that Book. Throughout the ages, the question has been asked, ‘If a man die, will he live again?’”
The unschooled psychic, who loved to intersperse his Bible reading with homely poetry, observed,

“One of the poets gave, ‘Dust thou art, to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul.’ It has been generally considered that if a man live again, it is his soul that lives.”

Cayce pointed out that the Bible was replete with references to rebirth.

“There are many instances when the Master said, ‘Ye must be born again.’”

Again, He said to Nicodemus,

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cans’t not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the Spirit”

His own readings helped Cayce to understand much that he could not understand before.

“We may read much in, or we may read much out, but did He mean what He said when He said to Nicodemus that ‘Ye must be born again?’ Did He mean it when He said to the Scribes and Pharisees, ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ Did He mean it when He said that John the Baptist was the incarnation spiritually of Elias? He said so.”

Cayce turned to where the disciples asked Jesus,

“Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’”

To Cayce, this clearly reflected a prevailing belief in reincarnation.

“Now it wouldn’t have been possible for the man to have sinned in this world, as we know the world, just in being born blind. They must have believed that the man lived before, else they wouldn’t have asked such a question.”

Another time, as Cayce recalled, as they came down from the Mount, Peter and John asked the Master,

“Why then say the scribes that Elias must come first?” And Jesus answered, “Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man suffer of them.”

Then the disciples understood that He spake unto them of John the Baptist.

Again, as Cayce quoted, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.”
Cayce turned to Paul.

“’The first Adam brought sin into the world, but the last Adam brought life.’” He did not push his own interpretation. “Whether that’s figuratively speaking or not, is for us to determine within our own experience.”

Even after his first life readings, Cayce did not immediately accept reincarnation; he considered it alien to Christianity.

“I was taught the Christian way of thinking, that a man only has one life, and as a man dieth so is he.”

But as he began to look at the Bible with new eyes, so did he look around him, and into himself.

“Always there was within me a feeling that did not find answer in what was ordinarily given as the answer for such feelings. How is it that some people we meet we immediately feel as if we had known all our lives, and others we have known for years in this life and still do not feel close to them or understand them? I don’t believe anyone can answer that unless there is more than just this life. Nothing lives again unless it dies, even the gram of wheat in bringing forth that which will propagate its own self.”

His own readings often proved out reincarnation for Cayce. In one reading, he told a woman that she had lived ten thousand years ago in what is now New Mexico, and had made certain hieroglyphics still to be found in that location.

“Later,” Cayce said, “the woman wrote me that she had gone there with friends, and had found the marks just as indicated.”

Cayce had never been to New Mexico and neither had she—in this life. “When she saw those indications, something answered within her so that she knew she had lived there and had made those marks.”

Just as some felt they had known one another before, so did the pattern of relationships in this life often reflect a previous association.

“If the information [in the reading] tells us that we were associated with certain individuals during certain periods in the earth’s plane, and we see in the present an exact replica of the description of former associations, we are bound to see the consistency of it.”

At a church forum, Cayce once submitted to questioning on reincarnation.

“Do you think,” someone asked, “that when a soul enters the earth plane it knows what sort of environment it is coming into, and the conditions it will have to face?”

Cayce drew on his subconscious knowledge.

“It must know that it is entering the environment which is necessary for its own development It knows that this is its opportunity to pass through that experience necessary for this development.”

Weren’t these past-life readings keyed more to the ego than anything else? It was something Cayce had thought often about.

“We hear the question, ‘What good will it do me to know that I lived as John Smith during the Revolution, or was a first settler, or that I was among those in the French Revolution, or a wine seller in such and such a period?’ Well, our soul, our entity is what it is today from how it has reacted to various experiences in the earth’s sphere.”

“How does the spirit find the body?” another asked.
“I do not believe that a soul enters until the breath of life is drawn. The soul doesn’t enter at conception.”

For reincarnationists, the following colloquy was enlightening:

“Is the soul sent here, or does it come of its own desire?”
“Comes of its own desire,” Cayce said, “for desire remains throughout all development of man, or of the soul, whether we speak of material, mental, or the soul portion. Desire goes right through, and is possibly the motive force behind the soul, for without a desire to do a thing we can’t get very far.”

“If the soul knows so much, why does it have to do all these things over again?”

“It’s very much like we have in a school. We go over and over a lesson in mathematics until we know not only that it is rote, but that we can get an answer by doing that. We have to know the principle of the thing, or the basis of it. Man goes over and over his lessons, and necessarily under such different environment that it builds that which is lacking, that has kept it from understanding its relationship to its Maker.
“Do you believe that every human being has a soul?”

Cayce then advanced a unique concept of man’s relationship with God.

“I believe that every human being has a soul, that which makes it akin to the Creator, that which is given an individual that he may become a companion to the Creator. As we see in the forces all about us, Nature herself desires companionship. So does God. He gives us the opportunity to be his companion, by giving us a soul, which we may make a companion with Him, but we have to do the making.”

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