David Kahn's Life with Edgar Cayce

This photo circa 1922 is from Edgar Cayce's Photographic Legacy (1978) compiled by David M. Leary.  David Kahn was inside his new Marmon touring sedan as Edgar Cayce kept his foot on the running board near San Saba, Texas.  The photo was taken by Hugh Lynn Cayce.

 
 
David Kahn (1893-1968) was in his mid-seventies when he worked on chronicling a memoir of his experiences with Edgar Cayce, resulting with My Life with Edgar Cayce (1970) by David E. Kahn as told to Will Oursler.  Kahn's wife Lucille also participated in a series of interviews for the book.  Will Oursler commented in the Preface:

Kahn was closer to Edgar Cayce and his family, over a longer span of years, than any other human being.  He personally brought many individuals to Cayce for readings; he himself helped to take down hundreds of readings in the early days.  He knew Cayce as friend and fellow adventurer across the Texas prairies and oil fields—and ultimately into the jungle of New York City.  But he knew his friend Cayce above all as an associate in psychic and metaphysical discovery.

Kahn at fifteen was living in Lexington, Kentucky when he agreed to take down a psychic reading communicated while Edgar Cayce was in a hypnotic sleep.  It was the first time of numerous occasions when Kahn observed how Cayce was able to manifest a source of unlimited knowledge while entranced.  Cayce had been summoned from Hopkinsville to give a reading that eventually resulted with the healing of a paralyzed woman who was a next door neighbor to the Kahns.  Cayce stayed with the Kahn family for a week and explained to David's father that he was not 'calling up ghosts of the departed': "Mine is more from my mind or my unconscious mind, which I have no explanation for; I do not consult the dead."  Mrs. Kahn agreed that whatever it was, it was not Spiritualism.

All of this began while I was in high school.  From there I went on to the University of Kentucky and had planned on a law career, which was interrupted by the war and my enlistment.

When Cayce first gave me a reading predicting that I would leave the flock and go into uniform, there was no immediate threat of war in sight in America, so I assumed he meant that I would become a policeman or a fireman.  This I did not think very probable.

But we liked each other and kept in touch.  Cayce agreed that he would give me readings whenever I asked.  Any time I wrote him a letter or telephoned with a request for a reading, or sent him a request from anyone I knew, he would respond as quickly as he could.

 
Kahn quoted from a letter written to him by Cayce that stated that the readings were "merely a channel though which such information may come as to assist one in understanding what would produce coordination in the individual body."  Cayce, himself, believed the readings to be "a manifestation of the universal force or source."  This Force would be articulated in Cayce's channeled readings as deriving from God and Christ Consciousness. 

Kahn's nickname for Cayce was 'Judge,' as is explained in the book.

Because of the difference in age between Cayce and myself, and the vast respect in which I held him, I did not feel that I could call him by his first name.  At the same time, "Mr. Cayce" seemed too formal and remote.  I thought about it and finally lit upon the word "Judge" as one that held the concept of honor and respect.  The word seemed to stand for the things he stood for, the depth of judgment and wisdom that he touched in the psychic world and also in his ordinary conscious life.  I had the feeling that he would judge my life and actions by the same high standards he held in his own.

Kahn learned that their friendship appeared to have been predicted in a reading.

There had been in one of Cayce's early readings about himself the statement that there would come a Jew into his life who would work closely with him and help to shape his future.

Judge himself told me of this, and it was clear he thought I was the one who would fulfill this prophecy from the reading.  The pattern of our family and our lives more than supported this view.

While serving in the army during World War I, Kahn continued to obtain information from Cayce.  Here is an example of what was learned through one of Cayce's readings with a description of the ensuing results.  On this occasion, Kahn had just learned about the death of a younger brother.

Out on the parade grounds was a pay telephone, and I put through a call from there to Selma, Alabama, where Cayce had moved.  When I reached Cayce I said, "Judge, I have two questions, please listen to me very intently.  I want to know if I will be able to get a leave of absence to go home to my family and if I can say two or three weeks when I get there.  If I cannot go I want to know why.  I'd like to know what is going to happen to me in the next six weeks."

As in all Cayce readings, I gave him no further information.

I said I would wait by the phone for him to call back and reverse the charges.  I knew he understood how very urgent it was to me.

Some time later, the phone rang. It was Judge.  "You can go home for three weeks if you want," he told me, "because you are not leaving Texas when you think.  There'll be an order very soon directing troops now on the Mexican border to report to your division to be inducted into the national Army.

"The commanding general is not going with the division when you go, but you will not go for at least three months.  When you get the notice to go, the general is going to give you the opportunity to go with him to Virginia as his aide, or to go with the division under a new general.  You will go with the division."

Kahn was also told he'd have many narrow escapes but never an accident and would come back in good health.  After informing General Greble of the prophecy, the general showed him orders that seemed to rule out these events; however circumstances soon changed and eventually everything Cayce had told him proved correct.

I accepted as an indisputable fact Judge's assurance that I would come through every danger in the war unscathed.  Holding approximately the same post in France that I had in the States—as a general's aide—I went everywhere, to the front, into the trenches, over open and unprotected areas, often under shelling or bombing.  I simply was not afraid; Cayce had said I would be all right.

After the end of the war, Kahn became involved with Cayce in a plan to utilize his psychic abilities to make money through Texas oil leases.  Cayce hoped to obtain funds for a hospital to be devoted to his psychic work.  Kahn acknowledged:

But the oil-drenched dreams of Cayce and myself were not to turn out as we two fervently desired.

The forces had other plans.

After giving up the Western adventure and returning home, Kahn had a reading from Cayce telling him his future in the business world would be in wood and metal.  Kahn soon went to work at a furniture company.  The readings also indicated an involvement with radios and music.  One of Kahn's successful ideas was putting radio sets into cabinets to make them fine pieces of furniture.

Through this period I consulted Judge regularly.  He was moving with his wife and family to Virginia Beach in September 1925.  However, I continued to get readings from him on every major step I took.  There was one rule about these readings that I always kept in mind: The readings outlined the opportunity indicated by what Judge called "the forces."  It was then up to the individual to make the opportunity work out.


As for engagement and marriage in my own case, the wheel of romance had begun to turn after I came to New York.  It had begun for me when I went into the Belasco Theater in New York on a lonely evening and saw for the first time a beautiful actress onstage whose last name happened to be the same as mine.

Kahn married Lucille in 1927.  The book includes Lucille's remembrances of her earliest readings with Cayce.  She recalled at the first reading feeling outraged when the entranced Cayce declared that a sick child would recover if placed on a diet solely of ripe bananas.  To her astonishment, she later learned that the child was getting along very well.  Kahn commented: "For in a sense in marrying me she was marrying also the Cayce family, and Judge himself, and the forces on which he drew . . ."  He explained:

My relationship with Cayce was a fundamental part of my business and personal life, as Lucille had to understand.  If I needed him, I called him.  If he needed me, he called me.  Many times I had emergency calls for financial help.  Except for his photography, Cayce never had a business himself.  Whatever the state of his finances, the readings were never commercialized.  Cayce could not use them to help himself in the everyday matters of supporting himself and his family.  The readings served to guide only others to health and happiness.

With his wife Gertrude, we sat up a membership organization so that he could have some kind of drawing account on which to live, so that he would be protected in giving the readings, and so that the public that kept constantly increasing its demands on him would not overtax his strength.  The readings warned that he should give only two readings a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  As long as we stayed with this limitation, Cayce continued with the work without ill effect.

Kahn realized that he "needed someone with acumen and experience to assist me in carrying out the programs Judge and I had been considering."  These plans included a hospital and Kahn's friend Morton Blumenthal became instrumental in making the hospital a reality although only for a short interim.  Kahn observed, "Unfortunately, even with the best will in the world, questions of control and authority arose, particularly as we reached the 1929 financial crash and the depression that followed."  Kahn admitted that he had not always followed the advice of Cayce's readings.

Approximately three months before the 1929 crash of the stock market, when everyone was involved in skyrocketing figures, Cayce warned me in a reading that the crash was going to come and advised that I get out of the market before this happened.

I did not doubt the reading.  I did question the timing.  Everything seemed to be going well.  I had enough money to care for my mother, to help my brothers and sisters establish comfortable lives for themselves, and to provide for my wife and child.  Actually, I didn't follow the market closely—it was the excitement of my business activities that concerned me.  So I left my investments in the hands of brokers.  Using my limited human range of knowledge instead of the sources on which Cayce drew, I had decided to wait and see.  Like millions of others, I held on, and when the first weeks of the crash were over, I found that I had almost nothing left.

Kahn continued to have financial success through considering the information presented in Cayce's readings.  On one occasion in New York in 1931, Edgar and his wife along with his secretary Gladys Davis were arrested on the charge of telling fortunes.  Kahn recalled: "The New York case received wide publicity, photographs and headlines in the papers."  A 1998 biography presenting recollections of Edgar's son Hugh Lynn Cayce mentioned about the 1931 arrest that New York tabloids described Gladys as Edgar's "pretty blonde secretary" and left his wife cropped out of the published photos.  During the trial, Kahn testified for the defense and the case was quickly discharged in Cayce's favor.

Kahn remembered that it was in 1936 when he and Cayce "decided to reorganize our activities under the name of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc. . . . The name was suggested in a reading."  News media occasionally reported about Edgar Cayce's psychic ability and he became known as this 'miracle worker of Virginia Beach.'

Kahn recalled that his two sons grew up in an exciting world.  "It was not at all unusual for the children to be in the room while Cayce was in trance state giving a reading about someone's previous life—or diagnosing ailments of some patient he had never seen."

Kahn recalled how a reading brought him into contact with the President's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, in relation to a community development project in Arthurdale, West Virginia — a place he and Cayce had never heard about before the reading.  As a result, Kahn oversaw the relocation of cabinet production to Arthurdale, commenting, "It was a partnership in humanity, a combined operation of business, government, and individuals."

Another reading advised Kahn to go to Washington, D.C., where he successfully met with those whom had been named in the reading: Mrs. Roosevelt, General Brehon B. Somervell and Secretary of the Treasury Morganthau.

I was ushered into one office where a colonel in charge had obviously been briefed that I was a trouble shooter who seemed to know how to get whatever was in critically short supply.
 
The colonel said he had been instructed to put me into the quartz crystal business.  I didn't know what quartz crystal was.  He explained that it was extremely important in submarine devices and in other vital instrumentation used in defense.

 
Kahn's job was to fill an order for eight million polished and cut crystals within a matter of weeks — what seemed an almost impossible assignment.

Then certain things began to happen—the unusual incident or coincidence that opened a way, a path ahead, the unlooked-for events that I had come—by association with Judge—to look for.
 
I consulted with a panel of thirty experts whose job it was to find and expedite the purchase of rare or difficult-to-obtain materials essential to the defense effort.  During the meeting, the panel discussed a new rumor that one man in Rio de Janeiro had accumulated large supplies of the quartz but was not shipping any of his stockpiles to America.  I asked for his name.  To the startled looks of some of the panel members, I picked up the phone, asked for the emergency operator—and called this man in Rio.  When he came on the line, I told him, "This is David Kahn in Washington, D.C.  Yesterday morning, when I left my home in Scarsdale, I drove your wife and your new baby girl to the station in my car.  They're en route to your mother's home in Washington."
 
The man was amazed and delighted at this unexpected news about his family.  He himself had not yet seen the little girl.  The mysterious man in Rio was our next-door neighbor in Scarsdale.
 
We found that the rumor was true.  He did have the quartz, five million two-pound boxes of it, outside his windows in Rio, but he had no planes, ships, or other means of transportation to get it out.  I said I could arrange that part of it if he could make a binding commitment.  He could and did.  Two days later two planes left for Rio to begin a daily shuttle between Rio and Miami bringing four thousand pounds of quartz crystal back on every trip.
 
It is such incidents that make me so sure that my life is not a series of coincidences but an unfoldment.

Kahn also found himself and Cayce involved in "some of the most startling coincidences in publishing history" concerning the book Starling of the White House (1946) by Thomas Sugrue, whose previous book was the Edgar Cayce biography There Is a River (1943).  A friend of Edgar Cayce, Hopkinsville-born Bill Starling asked about a planned biography during a Cayce personal reading.  "The reading said that Kahn should finance the book and Simon and Schuster should publish it . . . The reading went on to say that Tom Sugrue would be a good choice as the writer . . ."
 
On the morning following the reading, Kahn returned to New York.  Arriving around 1 am during a rainstorm, Kahn invited a "tall man carrying a black suitcase" to share a taxi ride.  They began talking and Kahn discovered the man was Max Schuster of Simon and Schuster.  When Kahn told him about the planned book about Bill Starling, Schuster informed him that Starling had put him into the Senate as a page boy when Schuster was around thirteen years old. 

Kahn was reunited with Edgar Cayce a month before Cayce's passing in 1945 following a stroke.  Three months later, Gertrude Cayce "joined her husband in that other realm."

The reading transcripts remain as an illuminating resources for researchers and scientists.  Kahn commented about the 'life readings' that were heard through Cayce while he was in a hypnotic sleep:

. . . in so many instances with Cayce's life readings, the people involved and the facts in this present lifetime bore out past history connections given in the life readings.


Many of the life readings would refer to the fact that the entity dwelled back in the lifetimes long since past in the land called Atlantis.


Atlantis, as Judge gave it in the readings, would appear to be not merely a physical civilization that sank below the waves of some tremendous flood or upheaval of the earth's surface, but, rather, a link between the purely spiritual, ethereal existence and the material; as if the souls of the universe, pure and unsullied at the outset, could by their very thinking become the entity in physical form.

Lucille Kahn commented about Edgar Cayce: "You know, when he started to give a reading, he had to have his head in one direction for life readings and in another direction for other kinds of readings . . . As I remember, when he gave life readings his head was south; for physical readings it was north."

"Most of us in ARE have accepted reincarnation as a fact. If every thought, deed, and act is recorded somewhere, then we do have to meet it.  It is the law of moral retribution.  It will be a guide in your way of life if you can accept it."

Lucille recounted being in her husband's presence as he made his transition to the afterlife.  During this interim he was only able to communicate at intervals because of the drugs.  "There were statements from time to time Dave tried to make, as he went in and out of this other realm . . . In his last moments of consciousness my husband, seeming to come back out of the beginnings of coma, opened his eyes and murmured to me, 'Tell them—there is survival.'"