Edgar Cayce Building

One of the buildings that caught my eye while we were in Virginia Beach was the Edgar Cayce building.

Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment was something I was familiar with, but not overly so. The place had a visitor center, so we stopped in.

 



You might call Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) the father of New Age. Or something like that. He was an American Christian mystic who answered questions on subjects as varied as healing, reincarnation, wars, Atlantis, and future events while claiming to be in a trance. A biographer gave him the nickname, "The Sleeping Prophet". A nonprofit organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, was founded to facilitate the study of Cayce's work.

Cayce was considered a psychic and he offered up a number of cures for various ailments. Therapies as divergent as salt packs, poultices, hot compresses, color healing, magnetism, vibrator treatment, massage, osteopathic manipulation, dental therapy, colonics, enemas, antiseptics, inhalants, homeopathics, essential oils, mud baths were prescribed. Substances used included oils, salts, herbs, iodine, witch hazel, magnesia, bismuth, alcohol, castoria, lactated pepsin, turpentine, charcoal, animated ash, soda, cream of tartar, aconite, laudanum, camphor, and gold solution. These were prescribed to overcome conditions that prevented proper digestion and assimilation of needed nutrients from the prescribed diet. The aim of the readings was to produce a healthy body, removing the cause of the specific ailment. Readings would indicate if the patient's recovery was problematic.

You might recognize a lot of that stuff from New Age holistic treatments today. Some of it I have tried; most I have not. I've tried magnets and they make me hurt. I tried castor oil on the weird issue with my stomach. I don't think it helped but I had very soft skin on my stomach for a while. Plus I discovered castor oil will eventually shrink a skin tag.

The visitor's center was essentially a New Age book store:

The facility has lectures and readings and things like that. Some were on fairly normal things; others on phenomenon like ESP. There is a garden labyrinth somewhere on the grounds that I did not see but would have liked to have looked at. It was difficult for me to get to without climbing stairs or wheedling my husband into driving around to find some place else to park.

The wares in the visitor's center were a bit pricy, so I bought nothing, but it was an interesting stop.