Selma, Alabama historical marker tells of 'The Sleeping Prophet'

Selma's Edgar Cayce Historical Marker

This week’s featured historical marker is “THE SLEEPING PROPHET” marker that’s located in downtown Selma, Alabama. This marker was erected by the Alabama Historical Commission, but unlike most markers of this type, it doesn’t indicate the year in which it was erected.

This marker is located on Broad Street, about one block down from the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. There’s text on both sides of this marker, but both sides are identical. What follows is the complete text from the marker.

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“THE SLEEPING PROPHET: EDGAR CAYCE (1877-1945), was internationally accepted as an extremely gifted psychic. An humble man, he never profited materially from his psychic ability, but used it to help ‘make manifest the love of God and man.’ Operated his photography studio and lived in this building from 1912 until 1923. Many psychic readings were given here during that time.”

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Cayce, who was born in Kentucky in 1877, came to Selma at the age of 35. This was about a decade after his supposed psychic abilities were first brought to light by a traveling stage hypnotist who hypnotized Cayce to help him when he lost his voice to laryngitis. Cayce was called “The Sleeping Prophet” because he displayed his psychic abilities while in a trance or sleeplike state.

Considered the “Father of the New Age Movement,” Cayce made a number of surprisingly accurate predictions. Among numerous other accurate predictions, he also predicted, the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression, Adolph Hitler’s rise to power, the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, the death of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the fall of the Soviet Union and his own death in 1945. He also made a number of predictions about the lost continent of Atlantis and events yet to come.

Cayce only had a ninth-grade education, was a devout Christian and was said to have been deeply conflicted about his purported psychic abilities. He took up photography because it was less of a strain on his voice, and this career is what landed him in downtown Selma. His fame grew while he lived in Selma, and even though that’s where he hung his hat, he traveled widely during this period giving psychic readings across the South. In 1945, during one of his trances, “his voice” instructed him to leave Selma.

From there, he moved to Virginia Beach, Va., where he founded a hospital in 1929. In 1931, he founded the Edgar Cayce Association of Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E), an organization that still exists today. For more information about A.R.E., visit www.edgarcayce.org. Fourteen years after the establishment of A.R.E, in 1945, Cayce suffered a stroke and died. His body was returned to his native state of Kentucky, and he was buried in his hometown of Hopkinsville.

In the end, visit this site next Wednesday to learn about another historical marker. I’m also taking suggestions from the reading audience, so if you know of an interesting historical marker that you’d like me to feature, let me know in the comments section below.