EDGAR CAYCE’S LEMURIA

This version of “Lemuria at its full extent” is published by the Theosophical Society

Atlantis Was Not the Only Lost Continent He Discussed

BY FRANK JOSEPH

Of our era’s alleged “psychics,” one name stands out among the rest. Edgar Cayce’s status as a genuine “seer” not only survived his mid-20th century death into the next Millennium, but has grown considerably beyond his lifetime reputation. The cause is not difficult to understand. His forty years of subconscious health pronouncements form a body of recorded medical information sought out by sufferers from around the world, as effective countermeasures to invasive, surgical procedures. His reputation as a healing intuitive aside, the far fewer utterances he made about Lemuria are not, as skeptics might expect, statements of wild fantasy, but remarkably consistent, and well within the scope of archaeology and geology. More valuably, they shed new light on the people, spirituality and destiny of Mu otherwise unavailable from conventional sources. Whether or not we give any credence to psychics, renowned or otherwise, his characterization of Lemurian persons and events is surprisingly credible and illuminating if viewed through the lens of neither preconceived belief nor unbelief.

Born 1877, in Kentucky, Cayce was known as “the Sleeping Prophet,” because he offered cures while in a deep trance. Until his death in Virginia, sixty eight years later, Cayce dictated thousands of “life-readings” allegedly obtained from a kind of spiritual record he claimed to be able to read while experiencing an altered state of consciousness. His formal education was meager, and points of reference were for him more spiritual than historical or academic. His grasp of the world was often biblical, not scholastic. It seems clear, then, that considerations of a sunken civilization were beyond the scope of his rural background, his fundamentally Christian worldview, and even his interests. Nonetheless, he inexplicably began talking about sunken cities one day during the course of giving his medical advice after nearly twenty years without mentioning a lost civilization. Awake, he knew virtually nothing about Atlantis and less concerning Lemuria. Yet, their sudden appearance among the “life-readings” was entirely in keeping with his therapeutic counsels.

During the early 1920s, in the course of listing and describing the root causes for various, inexplicable ailments afflicting his clients, Cayce stated that these apparently baseless health problems were the subconscious residue of negative behavior carried over from previous lives in Atlantis, a very long time ago. Unresolved at the time of its cataclysmic destruction, their “bad karma” carried over millennia of incarnations, inflicting each one, into the present lifetime, as guilt complexes, resulting in so-called “psychosomatic” conditions — actually, physical reflexes or reactions to spiritual pain, hence their suffering from incarnation to incarnation. “There can be no physical healing,” Cayce often repeated, “without spiritual healing, because the soul is the seat of our being.”

For more than twenty years after first startling his clients with their former lives in the sunken capital, Cayce went on to discuss Atlantis in many hundreds of “life-readings,” while far less frequently mentioning Mu or Lemuria. When asked why, he responded that the Atlanteans had be haved very badly, accumulating enormous karmic debt that needed to be set right over the course of numerous reincarnations. The virtuous Lemurians, spiritually solvent (for the most part) to the end, incurred less soul-debt, and were subsequently freer from the soul-cleansing round of birth-death-rebirth.

America’s renowned medical intuitive often mentioned Atlantis during his altered states of consciousness. But his description of the lost civilization was less for historical purposes than to provide a setting for pastlife behavior. According to Edgar Cayce, important ethical decisions acted upon in the ancient past contributed over subsequent reincarnations of a particular soul to its development, down to the present time. He believed that the predicaments or circumstances of the persons who sought his counsel during the early 20th century sometimes found their karmic roots in prehistory. Cayce was chiefly interested in Atlantis only insofar as it helped shed light on the spiritual condition of his clients. And since the Atlanteans were supposed to have been a morally challenged people, most of his “life-readings” concerned men and women who long ago dwelt in the doomed oceanic kingdom.

He found far fewer with Lemurian backgrounds, because the Pacific Motherland missed the materialism and wars which characterized its Atlantic counterpart, hence the substantially less karmic debt of its more peaceful inhabitants. What he did say about Lemuria, however, illuminated the lost realm from a truly unique perspective. Beyond any “psychic” or “karmic” considerations, Cayce’s readings about Mu or Lemuria are self-evidently plausible, because they often contain information that made little or no sense at the time they were made, but have been since confirmed in many instances by subsequent discoveries in geology and archaeology.

A case in point was his description of a forgotten civilization he claimed flourished in what is now the Gobi Desert many thousands of years ago when it was created by “those from the land of Mu” (1273-1 M.40 10/16/36). Living conditions then were utterly unlike the hostile environment for which the region is infamous, Cayce said, and began to rapidly deteriorate to its presently uninhabitable status immediately following the Great Flood. Recalling the Lemurian Garden of Eden, he spoke of “the first appearances of the Adamic influence that came to Asia and the Near East through “that now known as the Gobi land” (1210-1M.54 6/29/36).

When Cayce made these statements during the mid- 1930s, few people knew what he was talking about. One who did was James Churchward, whose several volumes about the Pacific Motherland had been recently published. In his first book, “The Lost Continent of Mu,” he declared, “at the time of the Uighur Empire, the Gobi Desert was an exceedingly fertile area of land. The Uighur was the principal colonial empire belonging to Mu at the time of the biblical “flood, which destroyed its eastern half. Eventually, the Uighurs extended themselves into Europe around the western and northern shores of the Caspian Sea, as related in a very old Hindu record. From there, they continued on through Central Europe ...”

During the lifetimes of Cayce and Churchward, and long after their deaths, both men were almost universally ridiculed by professional geologists and archaeologists for such statements. The Gobi Desert was generally believed to have always been an immense wasteland, never the “exceedingly fertile area” portrayed by the psychic and the colonel. Scanty records referred to a 12th century Uighur “kingdom” of sorts in Inner Asia, but nothing earlier. Today’s Uighurs are a sedentary people whose social organization revolves around village life in northwestern China, where they subsist on kaoliang, a kind of sorghum. “There seems to be little direct connection between the medieval people and those now bearing the name,” according to Rudy Evermann, a specialist in the history of the Gobi Desert. A Uighur impact on Europe appeared ludicrous and a crazy reversal of European influences on the Orient deemed incontrovertible by scholars.

In 1962, however, geological opinion was stood on its ear by abundant physical evidence proving that the Gobi region had indeed alternated between extended periods of fertility and aridity over the last few million years. The most recent environmental event-horizons occurred at the close of the Pleistocene Epoch, twelve thousand years before present, and again around the turn of the 4th millennium B.C. As recently as three thousand years ago, shepherds were tending flocks of sheep where today an ocean of sand spreads beyond the horizon. An even greater shock to conventional wisdom occurred in the following decade, when the corpse of a fair-complected, red-haired adult male was found in Central Asia. Almost perfectly intact because he had been naturally mummified by arid conditions of the Takla Makan Desert, the man was dated to nearly ten thousand years ago, millennia before the arrival of the first Chinese.

Nor was he alone. The remains of other, contemporary as well as later white-skinned men, women and children were excavated, more than five hundred alone in the Uighur areas of Ueruemchi and Tarim. Discoveries continued into the early 21st Century, when a cemetery of several hundred more Caucasian mummies was unearthed in the eastern Gobi during summer 2004 by Chinese archaeologists. Investigators were especially struck by the advanced state of attire worn by many of the corpses. They were dressed in beautifully made felt shirts, tailored trousers, elaborate skirts with handsome belts, silk scarves, leather jerkins, and shod with deerskin shoes or slippers.

The profusion and consistently skillful execution of their remarkably well-preserved clothing underscored Churchward’s comments, made fifty years before: “The Uighurs had reached a high state of civilization and culture; they knew astrology, mining, the textile industries (!), architecture, mathematics, agriculture (!), writing, reading, medicine, etc. They were experts in decorative art on silk (!), metals and wood, and they made statues of gold, silver, bronze and clay and this was before the history of Egypt began.” Archaeologists traced some of the Ueruemchi mummy styles and design patterns to Central Europe, again, as Churchward indicated decades earlier.

“The history of the Uighurs,” he stressed in italics, “is the history of the Aryans,” foreshadowing the anomalous discovery of ancient Caucasians in northwestern China, just where Cayce also spoke of an “Adamic” civilization in “the Gobi land.”

Although Cayce’s chronology is uncertain, his brief references to Lemuria are far less ambiguous and more convincing. A case in point is among the first statements he made about the lost Motherland, when he touched on Lemuria only briefly in his lengthy response to a question concerning geographical and geological conditions on Earth at the time homo sapiens-sapiens came into being. “The Andean, or the Pacific coast of South America,” he said, “occupied then the extreme western portion of Lemuria.” Sixty years after he made this statement, California’s Scripps Oceanographic Service published a series of maps revealing the latest discoveries in seafloor research. One such map details and names the Nazca Ridge, a more than two hundred mile long, former land-bridge that once connected the Peruvian coast at Nazca with a sunken archipelago. In 1932, Cayce appears to have identified an underwater feature unknown to science until the 1990s, thereby providing substantive evidence for Lemuria’s former existence.

Ironically, his first mention of the Pacific civilization, nine months after prophetically alluding to the yet-to-be-discovered Nazca Ridge, details the beginning of its demise. He stated that a “portion” of “Lemuria began its disappearance” ten thousand, seven hundred years ago. This time-period coincides remarkably well with the final moments of the last Ice Age, when melting glaciers generated dramatic increases in global sea-level, drowning coastal regions and far-flung lowland territories around the world. Lemuria and its culture continued to survive and prosper long after some territories were lost in the Ice Age Deluge, just as Cayce said. But related archaeological evidence tends to confirm his rough date for this early flood.

Of Lemuria’s demise Cayce said little, save that it took place before the final destruction of Atlantis. He was more concerned with the implications of the Pacific kingdom’s peaceful accomplishments, which continued to shape the reincarnated lives of men and women seeking his spiritual guidance. When asked why his readings of clients with past lives in Atlantis far outnumbered Lemurian reincarnations, he responded by saying that the Atlanteans had incurred much greater karmic debt, owing to their ancient obsession with materialism and its catastrophic outcome. Karma is the consequence of our behavior, he explained. By striving for social balance and individual harmony, the Lemurians largely avoided any need for reincarnation as a means of correcting the consequences of former indiscretions, and went on to fulfill their spiritual destiny in levels of being beyond the earth plain.