Edgar Cayce
A SEER out of SEASON
Edgar Cayce
A SEER out of SEASON
The Life of History’s Greatest Psychic
HARMON HARTZELL BRO, PH.D.
Copyright © 1989
by Harmon Hartzell Bro
A.R.E. Press Edition
1st Printing, April 2011
Printed in the U.S.A.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A.R.E. Press
215 67th Street
Virginia Beach, VA 23451-2061
ISBN 978-0-87604-604-3
New American Library edition published 1989
Edgar Cayce Readings © 1971, 1993-2007
by the Edgar Cayce Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Christine Fulcher
To my graduate students, who for nearly half a century have taught me so much with their questions and creations, and to those bold graduate students of the next half century who will try to figure out where seers and open vision belong in our culture.
And to my wife, June.
“The best (including most absorbing) account that has been written about history’s best-documented psychic. William James would have liked this book.”
Huston Smith,
author of The World’s Religions and Forgotten Truth
Contents
Part I The Gift: Love Surprised by Wisdom
1. I Don’t Do Anything You Can’t Do
3. When I Am Absent from the Body
5. In Those Days There Was No Open Vision
6. Friends, I Have Nothing to Sell
8. If This Is True, Why Haven’t I Heard of It?
Part II The Roots: Cayce Before Cayce
9. We Are Living Several Lives at Once
10. High Priest and Scoundrel, Warrior and Shepherd of Souls
Part III The Life: Wrestling through the Dawn
12. It Should Be Thoroughly Tested
13. Why Shouldn’t I Dread Publicity?
14. Untouched Oil Pools in Texas
15. The Great Influential Institution
17. Ask That the Life of Cayce Be Spared
Chronology of the Life of Edgar Cayce
PREFACE
Harmon Hartzell Bro, Ph.D. (1919-1997) was a psychotherapist, an educator, a writer, an ordained minister, and an inspirational lecturer. As a young man, he lived and worked in the Cayce home and witnessed several hundred readings. That experience enabled him to come to know Edgar Cayce better than most individuals who have written about the Cayce legacy. Eventually, Harmon wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cayce’s life and work, as well as several books about the Cayce information, including this one, Edgar Cayce—A Seer Out of Season.
Harmon first came to Virginia Beach in 1943 as a young minister, just graduated from Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He came to meet Cayce first-hand, as he was both curious and troubled that his mother, Margueritte Harmon Bro, had become involved with Cayce’s work. However, what Harmon witnessed in Virginia Beach was very different than anything he might have imagined. An October 1943 letter to his wife, June Avis Bro, expressed his enthusiasm for a work that would transform his own life. That letter stated, in part, the following:
Thin tubercular women, crippled boys, cancerous workmen, arthritic grandmothers knotted in pain—they all find healing. But that’s only the beginning—what really happens to them is what has happened to Mr. and Mrs. Cayce, Gladys Davis [Cayce’s secretary] and some others—they find that “there is a river” of God’s love flowing about us all, only waiting to be tapped by humble minds. The real miracles at Virginia Beach are the radiant, transformed lives, the people who go away realizing that they can actually find God and know Jesus and live like it. They say, “I am my brother’s keeper” and their lives show it. They say, “There is only one God” and all their friends feel it. Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, Catholic, Mennonite, Christian Scientist, Humanist, Presbyterian—it goes on like the “Ballad for Americans”—they all find what they are searching for in the work of the readings and Mr. Cayce . . .
Harmon and June Bro moved to Virginia Beach and became close friends with the Cayce family and worked as members of the Cayce office staff. At the time, there was a tremendous increase in requests for Cayce’s readings as a result of the publication of Cayce’s biography,