Atlantis Lost; Atlantis Found? (II)

So, where were we? Ahh yes, Edgar Cayce….the waco of wacos.

After Donnelly, Easily one of the most influential figures in the pseudoscientific Atlantean movement is Edgar Cayce. Between 1904 and 1910, in a small town in Kentucky called Hopkinsville, Edgar Cayce, first demonstrated his so-called psychic powers. However, unbeknownst to him, his “premonitions” would result in one of the most enduring psudoscientific atlantean myth movements in the 20th (and even into the 21st) century.

A quiet youth, Edgar Cayce was said to take after his grandfather, Thomas Cayce, who had been a famous water douser. While still living in Kentucky, Edgar Cayce went into a self-induced hypnotic trance or sleep when he sought to use his supposed psychic powers. After marrying a woman named Gertrude Smith, Edgar moved to Alabama, then to Texas, where he was involved in a fiasco (which some believe was a scam) in which he unsuccessfully attempted dowsing for oil in order to raise money to build a hospital.

In the late 1920s, Edgar Cayce moved his growing family to the sand hills of Virginia Beach where he dreamed of establishing a curing hospital using his psychic readings. Although the hospital venture failed, Edgar Cayce, who by this time was widely referred to as the “sleeping prophet,” founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), an organization designed to support and archive his readings.

The documents archived at the Association for Research and Enlightenment headquarters, which eventually numbered close to 50000, were answers to questions put to him by more than 8000 individuals who sought his help. Only after his death in 1945 were the documents actually catalogued by his sons and devoted followers.

Cayce’s archaeological insights were primarily offered to questioners as context for their previous lives – as Cayce was a strong believer in reincarnation. During his life, Cayce had pronounced that a great many of his followers (of which he had actually accumulated many) were reincarnations of citizen’s of Atlantis. In fact, the legendary sunken continent, which entered into western popular culture through two of Plato’s dialogs (remember Timaeus and Critias), was mentioned in more than 30% of his collected readings.

As a result, Cayce documentation, which covers a period of 50,000 BC and 10,000 BC, of the fictional civilization is especially rich – and is also where we find an Egyptian connection. According to the information that Cayce relayed during his self induced trances, he asserted that Atlantis had been a once powerful (and extremely advanced) civilization that had once possessed technology such as laser beams, aircraft, and radios. However, though an unknown series of events, Atlantis had been destroyed. The citizen’s of Atlantis, however, used their crude aircraft to flee the sinking continent to France, Egypt and the Yucatan Peninsula. Thereafter, the technology of the Atlanteans declined quickly, and eventually disappeared altogether.

In Egypt, the Atlanteans made their mark on the civilization by building the Sphinx around 10,500 BC in the likeness of one of their rulers. Cayce predicted that, before building the Sphinx, the Atlanteans who had settled in Egypt had constructed an immense library in the Giza Plateau, which Cayce called the Hall of Records, which contained all of the knowledge of their vastly superior civilization.

As a side note, it’s interesting to remark that Cayce had predicted that a series of great geologic upheavals would occur in 1969 which would precede the reemergence of parts of Atlantis off the cost of the Eastern United States.

In our next installment, we’re going to tie up the discussion, and revisit the issues that set this whole tirade off in the first place
– Dr Rainer Kuehne’s assertion that satellite photos of southern Spain reveal features appearing to match descriptions made by Greek scholar Plato regarding the fabled utopia of Atlantis.