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originally posted by: AdmireTheDistance
Let's see, Edgar Cayce...The 'psychic' who said that California would fall into the Pacific and that China would have been entirely converted to Christianity by the end if the 60's. The 'psychic' who said that 1933 would be a good year financially. The 'psychic' who said that we'd find an "Atlantean death ray" in '58....The fact that anybody today even knows his name is mind-boggling. The fact that anybody today believes any of his 'predictions' is terrifying.
One problem here, as with most claims of psychic success, is the fairly vague nature of the "psychic" predictions. It's made worse by the fact that Cayce gave thousands upon thousands of readings--he was bound to get a few right by accident. As with most "psychics," people remember the hits and forget the misses.
I'm not entirely sure what you meant about the stenographer, but, yes, according to The Skeptic's Dictionary (skepdic.com/cayce.html), a stenographer did take notes during the sessions. However, this has little to do with whether his readings were accurate. "But wait," you might say, "we can look at those reports and see if he was accurate!" Not really. The Skeptic's Dictionary notes: "Cayce usually worked with an assistant (hypnotist and mail-order osteopath Al Layne; John Blackburn, M.D.; homeopath Wesley Ketchum). According to Dale Beyerstein ("Edgar Cayce: The 'Prophet' Who 'Slept' His Way to the Top," Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 1996), "these documents are worthless by themselves" because they provide no way of distinguishing what Cayce discerned by psychic ability from information provided to him by his assistants, by letters from patients, or by simple observation. Also, Beyerstein explains, "the transcripts tell only what Cayce said, with no indication of what he said as being true." As the Skeptic's Dictionary notes, "1n short, the only evidence for Cayce's psychic doctoring is useless for testing his psychic powers."
According to Cayce, the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were built by survivors from Atlantis - in 10500 BC. He said that the Atlanteans had built an underground 'Hall of Records' that contains the collected wisdom of their race and which, he said, would be discovered in 1998. This would somehow trigger a New Age, and the emergence of a new race.
We spent a lot of time looking at Cayce's predictions - and found that, despite the fact that his followers claim that he was 'close to one hundred per cent accurate', you would be hard pressed to find even one of his prophecies that has come true.
For example, recently someone told us that Cayce was a brilliant prophet because, in the early 1940s, he predicted that China would become Communist by 1968. Of course, if true, that would be impressive. Unfortunately, what Cayce actually said was that China would become Christian by 1968.
But even so Cayce is extremely interesting. Far from being a virtual simpleton, he was extremely widely read, and as a young man worked in several bookstores. He was also entrusted with setting up new lodges for his fellow Freemasons. But more significant than that were his contacts. We discovered that, just after the First World War, Cayce was called in to advise President Woodrow Wilson. The person who arranged this was a close friend of Cayce's, Colonel Edmond Starling, who was head of the US Secret Service.