"Somebody wrote a book, Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet I don't consider him a prophet exactly. He didn't really prophesy things. He said the future wasn't fixed, we could change it." Edgar Evans Cayce, youngest son
Anyone with an open mind who is searching for the meaning of life will eventually discover the work of Edgar Cayce, probably the most documented and one of the most accurate psychics in the history of the western esoteric tradition. His gift to the world was psychic readings given freely they didn't have 1-900 numbers for $4 a minute psychic hotlines in those days. Edgar Cayce gave thousands of free psychic readings, on multiple topics, over several decades. His readings are preserved and cataloged at the Association For Research and Enlightenment, or the A.R.E., in Virginia Beach, Virginia, founded by Cayce before his death in 1945.
Edgar Evans Cayce, youngest son of Edgar Cayce, graduated from Duke University in 1939 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is a registered professional engineer in Virginia, retired after 43 years of service with the Virginia Power Company. He is the co-author of Edgar Cayce On Atlantis, now in its 29th printing, and The Outer Limits Of Edgar Cayce's Powers. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, the A.R.E., and Atlantic University.
A guest on both 21st Century Radio@ and The Zoh Show several times, Edgar Evans Cayce joined Dr. Bob on September 17, 1997 to review The Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited, which he first discussed on 21st Century Radio@ in 1989. Originally published by Harper and Row in 1988, it was rereleased by St. Martin's Press in 1997. The updated sections in the 1997 release review the latest discoveries that could corroborate Cayce's predictions on Atlantis.
Tell us about your father, the man Edgar Cayce, and his work.
Well, Edgar Cayce was a very normal person when he was awake. He was only unusual when he was in a self induced hypnotic trance, in which state he did not remember anything he said, but he could be asked questions, and he would answer questions on practically any subject. About 60% of his so-called readings... were physical diagnoses of individuals' physical conditions and suggestions for their cure. About 20% of them were these so-called vocational guidance or life readings -- this is where the material for Atlantis came from. Because someone who was interested in astrology asked him for an astrological reading, and he said, "Well the stars didn't have as much effect on the life as his past lives." He proceeded to tell this man who he was in his past life and what effect it was having on his present life. That started the series of life readings. When Dad woke up and heard what he'd said, he was as astounded as anybody. He didn't know anything about reincarnation and karma, and he always said if he ever gave a reading that would hurt anyone he would quit. He never did, and he gave readings until he died in 1945. Some of the life readings seem to have been as helpful as many of his physical readings. The other 20% were probably miscellaneous readings on various subjects.
When Edgar Cayce was awake, he liked to garden. He was a great fisherman.... I think a little bit of his psychic ability kind of seeped over into his everyday life. Because I never saw him come back from a fishing trip without a fish; I never saw him come from his gardens without his hands being full.... We lived in several houses in Virginia Beach and left a trail of trees and rose bushes and whatnot, every house we lived in.... He liked to make jelly. He liked to do carpentry work. He built a garage on one house and an addition to one other that we lived in. He taught Sunday school in the Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach for years. So, he was a very normal person in everyday life. It was just this period of once or twice a day, when he would go into this trance and give these so-called readings on people, that he was very unusual.
Would you say, in some ways, that your father was a workaholic?
He worked himself to death, at the end. He normally gave about two readings a day, (but] after the book came out, There Is A River, he became sought after, popular overnight. People would call him up in the middle of the night saying "My daughter's dying. Can you do something for her?" He started giving four, five, six, eight readings a day and he had a breakdown. He had a reading on himself, and it said he was just trying to do too much. If he didn't stop, it would kill him. And he didn't stop, and it killed him. He had a stroke and died.
In The Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited you have collected all the information from your father's readings that mention the lost continent of Atlantis and the Earth changes that apparently brought about its demise. What archeological or geological discoveries have been made in the decades since he gave these readings that appear to corroborate their veracity?
Well, Atlantis hasn't been proven to have existed yet, but it hasn't been disproven either. Remember, he started giving these readings back in the early 20s and 30s when the ideas of geology and archeology were quite different than they are now. And when he made statements like "people had been on North America 10 and 20 thousand years ago, that man had been in the Earth millions of years ago", instead of hundreds of thousands, everybody said, well this is ridiculous. Everybody "knew" the Indians hadn't been in North America over two or three thousand years, and that man hadn't been on the Earth anywhere near that long, and this material couldn't be taken seriously. This was before radio carbon dating. Now we have a radio carbon date in Pennsylvania of 17,500; California of 20,000; South America of 35,000. There are manlike creatures that have been discovered going back as far as four million years. So, a lot of the things he said in those days that were not taken seriously at all, the new discoveries in archeology and geology, tend to show that he was actually right. When he said the poles had shifted before, nobody could believe that there was such a thing as a pole shift. Now they've discovered that there have been a number of pole shifts and they have been at the times he said they were. They seem to have been associated with Earth changes.
He made one other interesting statement. He said the Nile River used to flow west into the Atlantic. This was millions of years ago. Of course, there is no way of proving it. There are no records going back that far. But in 1987 when they took pictures from the space shuttle of the ground penetrating radar over the Sahara, it showed the old course of the Nile River flowed west, right into the Atlantic, right at the bend in Africa, right where he said it did. This was 60 years after he made that statement in a reading... A lot of the statements he made that sounded ridiculous years ago have since been proven to be very accurate.
How did Cayce's readings on Atlantis differ from the published material of other occultists like H.P. Blavalsky, Scott Elliot and James Churchwood?
Cayce actually wasn't an occultist because his statements about Atlantis, though he did say they had a highly technical civilization, he didn't get into the root races and the wild characters of Blavatsky. He followed Plato, who was the first person to write about Atlantis [in Timaeus], the only written record we have, back in the 5th Century B.C. He said it was a tale he heard from his uncle by way of some priest he had visited in Egypt. The Egyptian priest had said that Atlantis was a country in the Atlantic that existed about 9,000 years previously, and that it was sunk in a volcanic and earthquake catastrophe. No one at that time could accept a civilization that old. Now there may have been records of it, other written records in the library in Alexandria, which [were] burned and all the written records there were lost. He was the first to write about it. A lot of people have written books about it, but most of them have either been trying to dig up evidence to prove or disprove or try to rationalize it by moving the location, by saying it was somewhere else. A number of writers in different countries have written about it.
PIECING TOGETHER CAYCE'S
READINGS ON ATLANTIS
Now, Cayce's story of Atlantis, I actually tried to piece it together from all the life readings. Edgar Cayce gave about 14,500 readings in his lifetime. About 2,500 of those were the so-called "life readings". Of those 2,500, about 700 mentioned incarnations in Atlantis.
The difference between Cayce's story of Atlantis and Plato's is that Plato talks about one destruction about 910 thousand years ago -- maybe more now. Cayce speaks of three destructions. He said the continent, or the land mass, existed as far back as 200,000 years ago. There was a destruction about 50,000 B.C., when part of it sank. Another one about 28,000 B.C., when it was split up into islands, the last one about 9 or 10 thousand B.C., when the last islands went under. This is probably the destruction that Plato spoke about. So, according to Cayce, the country did exist for a very long time. Plato did say it was a highly technical civilization, but Cayce went into more detail and said some very unusual things about it. He talked about things that sounded like atomic power -- he didn't say atomic power, per se, but it sounded like atomic power, it sounded like lasers, it sounded like aircraft, and all that which seems ridiculous from that long ago.
But there have been a few pieces of evidence, lately, that show that technical civilizations did exist in the past.
How do Cayce's readings on the shifting of the poles compare to our present knowledge of magnetic pole shifts and climatic change and extinctions?
Cayce named some times of the pole shifts. He spoke of one at 28,000 B.C., of one at 11,000 B.C. He spoke of Earth changes or climatic [changes] in connection with those pole shifts. The oldest pole shifts were much longer ago than that. Until very recently, there was some evidence of a pole shift about 28,000 B.C. at the time he said, another one called the Gothenburg "flip"... 11,000 years ago, which would make it 9-10 thousand BC, which is right at the time both he and Plato said Atlantis disappeared. Now there has been evidence discovered of animals frozen in the ice in Siberia that lived in a much warmer climate. There is evidence from seeds from pods from the bogs in Mexico that there was a temperate climate instead of a tropical climate there. So there definitely have been changes in the Earth's climate in areas in the past, and they seem to be the areas that Cayce mentioned, and they seem to be at the times he mentioned. Most of the new archeological and geological discoveries continue to substantiate Cayce's story rather than refute it.
Cayce indicated that a part of Atlantis could be found in the area near Bimini island. Summarize for us the work done since the 1920s, trying to uncover evidence in this area, by Dr. William Bell in 1957, and Dr. Manson Valentine, Dimitri Rebakoff, and Dr. David Zinc more recently.
Yes, all of those people have done a lot of research on trying to find evidence for Atlantis in that area. Now, there isn't any question that all geologists will agree that the level of the ocean used to be a lot lower than it is now. There are caves off of Florida that are 20 or 30 feet underwater where they have found human and animal remains. Now, the people didn't live in caves underwater, so that land was above sea level in the past. There is very good evidence that the sea level is probably almost a hundred feet
higher than it was about 10,000 years ago. Then the melting of the glaciers raised the level. So, if you look at a map of the area around Bimini, the whole Bahama bank, there are... hundreds, close to thousands, of square miles of water that is very shallow. If you drop the sea level a hundred feet, there would be a very large land mass in that area. So, I don't know if that was all of Atlantis, but certainly it could easily have been part of it.
UNUSUAL FORMATIONS DISCOVERED
As for the discoveries in that area, we haven't discovered Atlantis there, but they've discovered a lot of unusual formations. I think the first one was the so-called "Bimini Road", which was a series of large blocks of different sizes, some of them eight to ten feet long, three or four feet thick, four or five feet wide. They were a long series of blocks for several hundred feet that looked like an inverted "J" shape. There have been a lot of arguments between the geologists and the people who found them. They were discovered, I think, from the air by somebody flying over them in a airplane. That was the first sighting of it. Zinc did a lot of measurements on it. The geologists, of course, claim that it is beach rock that has formed underwater and fractures in that area. Normally it fractures parallel to the beach. But there are some unusual formations, in fact, that turn around in an inverted "J". Beach rock does not fracture like that, not in curves. That makes it questionable as to whether it is beach rock or isn't. Probably most of it is. The jury is still out on that. You can argue it both ways.
SHARK AND CAT FIGURES
FOUND
There have been other formations that you can see from satellite photos and airplanes that look like rectangles or geometric figures. Just recently, Doug Richards, one of the co-authors of the book, had some pictures of this and actually visited the sight. There's a formation in the mangrove swamp, not in the water, but in a mangrove swamp on Bimini, of a figure of a shark. It looks exactly like a shark. It's about the size of some of the effigy figures in Ohio up in that area where there is a snake mound or serpent mound.... This is several hundred feet long. It's not very high but it's in the middle of a mangrove swamp. Whether it's natural or whether it's manmade, here again this has not been determined. They have visited the sight, and it's not very high above water level, perhaps at about four or five feet, but it does have this peculiar shape. There are some other figures near it, like a rectangle and something that looks like a cat with two eyes. The orientation of these figures is kind of interesting, because Doug did a lot of research on this. There is a computer program called "Sky Globe" that you can set up to see what the stars looked like at any time in the past, back to thousands of years ago. It looks like some of the angles not only point north and south, but some of them are aligned at some of the brightest stars in the heavens at about a thousand years ago. This is much too... late for Atlantis, I guess you'd say. It's not old enough. But, it's about the same time as some of those effigy figures in Ohio are dated. Now, here again, whether they are man-made or whether they are actual figures or natural formations, they've just been discovered, so there really hasn't been enough research on it to prove it one way or the other.
Didn't Dr. David Zinc find a spherical object that was like a head?
He found an object that looked like a head that had been eroded. It looked like part of a statue.... And also he found a block. I saw this block. He brought it to the beach one time. It was a piece about the size of a desk blotter. It had a tongue and groove in it just like tongue and groove lumber. I never saw a block that had a tongue and grove in stone like that. That almost had to be man made. It couldn't be natural. Now, whether it fell off a ship, or whether it's part of a building or something, here again, you don't know. Its very hard to date it. You can't radio carbon date stone. There are ways of dating objects, but you need some carbon compound in it to date it. That's when they did the carbon dating on the pyramid. They couldn't date the rock, but they could date animal excrement or they could date fiber or a piece of weed or wheat or anything that was in the mortar.
According to Cayce, there were migrations from Atlantis to North America, Egypt, Peru, and the Yucatan. Does recent evidence support this theory?
Well, I think so. A lot of people think so. Of course, Cayce said Atlantis did not sink in a day and a night as Plato said, but it sank over a period of time. The people went both ways from this land that was being destroyed by volcanic eruptions and flooding, and they went into South and Central America and they went into Africa. Probably Ignatius Donnelly, in Atlantis, The Antediluvian World, collected more data about that. What be tried to do is show that customs on [either] side of the Atlantic were similar, that the plants and vegetables were similar, that the legends and whatnot on both sides of the Atlantic were similar. A banana plant, for example, a seedless plant, with only a perennial root, was found on both sides of the Atlantic and yet it [must have] been under cultivation [for a very long time on opposite sides of the ocean.] A number of plants and animals are very similar. Some of the language is similar. There are cities in Africa and South America with very similar sounding names. Of course a lot of critics of Donnelly say this is a coincidence, that this could happen, and just because the names are the same, and the languages are similar, it doesn't mean there is any relation. The fact that there were pyramids on both sides of the Atlantic or customs on both sides, doesn't prove that Atlantis existed. Of course it doesn't. But it certainly gives a reason for the people in Africa having a legend of coming from the West and the people in Central and South America having a legend of a homeland in the East. So, it sounds like there was something in the middle there.
... Ignatius Donnelly made a lot a statements, obviously, that were not true. He says that part of the Mayan alphabet was pure Greek. Not so. A lot of people have accused him of reasoning from a molecule of fact and a mountain of surmise. He did tend to stretch things. But he did collect an enormous amount of facts, certainly of things that were so, [and] put them together to show that they might have been.
This book that we wrote tries to be scientific. Every statement we make has been backed up by research and discovery. We don't have any flying saucers in it. We don't have any three headed people. We don't have anything that hasn't been backed up by archeological and geological discoveries. For example, a lot of people may not have heard of the Piri Re'is Maps. When you talk about a technical civilization a long time ago, there were some maps that were discovered, supposedly they were used by a Turkish geographer named Piri Re'is. [The Piri Re'is Maps, discovered in 1929, were drawn in 1513 but based upon much older maps.] The interesting thing about them is that they show the coastline of South America and they show the Antarctic continent in an unglaciated condition. They show the land mass. Well, it's been a long time since there wasn't any ice and snow on Antarctica. The Navy did make a sonic survey there trying to determine the land mass beneath the ice, and it matched so exactly with that map. They said this couldn't have been done without aerial survey, or else the same type of equipment we are using now to map it, if it was made while the ice was still there. In either case, that's a lot of technology that nobody thought existed that long ago.
[Note: The Charles Hapgood classic on the Pirl Re'is Maps, entitled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, long out of print, was recently republished by Adventures Unlimited Press, phone 1-800-718-4514.]
Cayce noted that records of Atlantis had been taken to Egypt, and many expeditions have tried to locate them. Where did Cayce predict those records would be discovered in Egypt, and has there been any success in trying to find them?
Cayce said there was a chamber or pyramid or room, or something that hasn't been discovered yet, in front of the Sphinx; that there was an entrance to it from the right forepaws. Now, doing excavation in Egypt is kind of like going to Washington and saying, "We would like to dig a hole under the Lincoln Memorial or Washington Monument." They are national treasures. So getting permits to do any excavation in Egypt is very difficult. It's something that has happened since this book has been published, just in the last month, and I'm glad you asked the question. I don't know how accurate this is. I'll tell it to you for what it is worth. There was Joseph Schor who gave a report at an A.R.E. conference on Atlantis this past August. He had done some radar and sonic surveys. He didn't go into detail about the equipment he used.. I don't know what type it was, or who was doing it. I understand there was a geologist, [Thomas] Dobecki, who was involved in some of it. He claims to have detected a 25 by 40 foot room or cavity with parallel walls about 35 feet below ground level [at the Sphinx]. The floor seems to go down to about 60-80 feet below the surface and this was in front of the Sphinx. He's trying to get a permit from the Egyptian government to excavate it. He thinks he has found this Hall of Records that Cayce was talking about. Whether this is so or not, I don't know. This is what the man has said. He's found something down there. Some kind of anomaly. There have been other anomalies discovered by a Japanese team and by other people, but the Egyptian government is rather reluctant to dig them up.
As a matter of fact, there was a German team, that was working on the Great Pyramid, that sent a robot camera up an air shaft that found this door with a copper handle. And it is an unopened chamber They don't know whether it has been opened in the past. There is a chamber there that nobody knew about in the Great Pyramid.... This room, this cavity, this anomaly in front of the Sphinx is something brand new. It's just been discovered [by] Joseph Schor, who was working with the permission of the Egyptian government to do the sonic or radar survey. But, he has no permit, yet, to do any excavation.... It will be interesting to see what is there.
Why would the Egyptian government wish to interfere with research expeditions investigating anomalies within their monuments?
Egyptologists are very protective of their interests. I know when the carbon dating of the Sphinx was sponsored by the A.R.E. some years ago -- it was discussed in our book -- Dr. Herbert Haas, at Southern Methodist University's Radio Carbon Lab, did the carbon dating and the smaller samples were done at the linear accelerator in Zurich. He had them calibrate it with tree ring dating. He swears by the dates. It didn't show that the Great Pyramid is as old as Cayce said, but it was about 400 years older than the Egyptians think the Pharaoh lived who built it. So either he lived at a different time or he didn't build it. Also, they wouldn't let us take any samples from inside the pyramid. The only thing we could take were samples from the exterior block. It turned out that some of the blocks from the top were two and three hundred years older than those at the bottom. It wasn't built from the top down so it seems to indicate there must have been repairs made to the Sphinx in the past. There is other evidence for that. There are records of the Pharaoh they think built it, making repairs to it. Well, if he made repairs to it, obviously it was pretty old before he had to make repairs to it.
... They've stopped anybody from sending out samples for dating... [because] they don't want to have their theories upset. That means everything they think they know, they really don't know.
While we understand that these monuments are national treasures, shouldn't finding the truth be important too?
I can see a little bit of their side. They are having a lot of problems with the Great Pyramid in some places deteriorating, and the Sphinx deteriorating. And they are protected as national treasures, but it seems to me they could be a little more open minded about the research.
There has been some concern that America may be going the way of Atlantis, especially with regard to the increase, in earthquake activity. Do the Edgar Cayce readings or recent geological findings support this concern?
We mentioned that in our book. Of course, Cayce did say the future is not fixed, we can change it. But he did say a number of years ago, as much as 30-60 years ago, he said there were. possibilities of earthquakes in the United States in the future, and other parts of the world. Now, in 1987 the American Association of Engineering Societies, this is a legitimate organization, was interested in what would happen to things like transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines in the case of a major quake. You now the largest earthquake, the greatest magnitude earthquake, in the United States was not in California, where everybody thinks of large earthquakes, but in Missouri, in the middle of the country. In 1800 and something, it rang church bells in Boston 2,000 miles away. It was a big quake. Of course, there were not many people there then, so there wasn't that much damage to property. But if something like that happened now, it would be a big difference. They published a map [and] wrote a little pamphlet about the possibility of the earthquakes and the fault zones.
They had a map of the fault zones in the eastern United States. The interesting thing about it is that the fault zones that they showed in the Charleston, SC area, the New York area, and the [Georgia] area, where the first big earthquake occurred, were exactly the same that Cayce mentioned years ago. But, their conclusion was that the possibility of a major quake in the next 25 years in Eastern United States was 100%, which is just about nearly certain. They just don't know where it will be. This is not Edgar Cayce talking, this is the American Association of Engineering Societies on the possibility of an earthquake on one of these fault zones.
We ARE having larger quakes more frequently.
I hope they're wrong.... I hope Cayce's wrong. He just said it was likely. He said Japan was a likely target. There. have been some big earthquakes in Japan.... We checked the earthquakes for a four year period and then the most recent four year period. The percentage of major quakes, of magnitude 7 and greater, is up about 49% over the most recent five years, and every four years, and the four years before. Now, of course, it does vary. Every year is not the same, but it seems to be increasing. And, that is not real encouraging.
Tell us more about the possible new chamber found inside the Great Pyramid. What is the holdup in futhering the exploration of what is behind the tiny door?
Well, the Egyptians are the ones holding up our knowing anything about it. What brought it up was that they were having trouble with moisture. All the visitors, with their breathing air in and out, were bringing a lot of moisture into the Pyramid and it was deteriorating the limestone in there. And the Egyptians were concerned about it. They were trying to get a ventilation system fixed that would help it. A German team was investigating these little so-called air shafts that run upward in the pyramid. Some of them go all the way to the surface of the pyramid from the King's Chamber, the Queen's Chamber, and some of the other chambers to the outside surface. These air shafts are too little for a person to get in. They are something like 8-10 inches or 12-15 inches; very small shafts. They built a little robot camera that would run up the shafts to see what was up there, where it would go and it would take pictures. In fact, there was a video shown in the United States of what this camera found. The thing went up the shaft and it came to what looked like a little door and it had copper handles on it. The shaft stopped. Well, the interesting thing about it was that it was the same distance above the Queen's Chamber as the King's Chamber... as if there was some relationship between these chambers in the pyramid.
Nobody knew the chamber was there. There was a little crack on the side of the door, and there was dust of something around it. Now the dust was a different color than the walls of the chamber. And there must have been a good size chamber behind this door for it to create air currents that would blow dust out of it. The dust looked like the kind of thing that would come from either parchment or fabric or wood or something that had deteriorated. So, it may be a tomb, or it may be nobody knows what it is because it hasn't been opened yet. There's no way a person could get up that shaft. It looked like the door could be raised, but it hasn't been investigated. The Egyptians, as far as I know, have no plans to investigate it. Of course, you could dig through from the outside of the Pyramid, but that takes a lot of work, and you would be digging into a national monument. I don't know whether they'll do anything about opening it or not.
I know that the boat pit that they discovered outside the pyramid was known about [for] a year before they ever did anything about it. It's very slow getting a permit to do anything over in Egypt as far as excavation goes. A lot of politics are involved.
How might Zecharia Sitchin's writings on the Sumerian texts be linked with the Cayce readings on Atlantis?
I'm not familiar with his writings. [If] Atlantis... existed, according to Cayce, for thousands of years, it probably had communication... world[wide]. People got around and knew other civilizations in other countries. They were not necessarily founded by Atlantis, but coexisted a long time ago such as civilizations coexist now. There are people in other parts of the world just like there were in [the time of] Atlantis.
Are Extraterrestrials mentioned in the Cayce readings?
He said that the universe was full of life of all kinds. That there was no life like ours in this solar system. But, he said that the universe was full of all sorts of life.
How much of the Edgar Cayce readings are available on computer or Internet?
It's been simplified quite a lot. All the readings have now been put on a CD-Rom disc and they have a search engine, you can look up words, phrases or topic. Anybody can get this disc. It's for sale by the A.R.E. Anybody with access to a computer with a CD-Rom drive can research it at their leisure.
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The Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited: The Century's Greatest Psychic Confronts One of the World's Oldest Mysteries, by Edgar Evans Cayce, Gall Cayce Schwartz and Douglas R. Richards, recently revised and updated by St. Martin's Press, Is available In most major book stores. For Information on the A.R.E. call 1-800333-4499, or write to P.O. Box 595, Virginia Beach, VA 23451, or visit them on the web at www.are-cayce.com.
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