Random Writing Wednesday: Edgar Cayce and Oil

Every now and then, especially when I’m trying to cram more into a week than there is time and also try to recover a bit for the final push of the semester, some bizarre coincidence captures my attention. This week, I was reading a bit about Egar Cayce, the famous early 20th century clairvoyant who died in 1941.

His legacy is particularly important in pseudoarchaeological circles in part because he claimed to channel the voice of Ra Ta an ancient Egyptian. He then did a series of “readings” which described life in ancient Egypt and offered controversial dates on the various monuments, including the Sphinx. The best summary of Cayce’s readings was edited by Mark Lehner in the 1980s. Cayce’s organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), ultimately funded various efforts to date the Sphinx and to conduct remote sensing on the monument in an effort to determine its age and whether it contains a passage to a secret archive (as described in Cayce’s readings). Needless to say, these efforts have proven inconclusive. That said, Cayce’s organization, the A.R.E., supported the work of Mark Lehner and the education of Zahi Hawass, whose many media appearances and position as Minister of Tourism and Antiquities gave him global renown. 

My post today isn’t about pseudoarchaeology, but about Cayce’s efforts to use his powers of clairvoyance to discover oil in the central Texas town of Desdemona. Sidney Kirkpatrick’s book, Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet, offers a good oversight of his time as in the oil industry. In 1918, he and business partner invested in a dry well that Cayce, in a clairvoyant trance, identified as being able to produce oil. He instructed the driller the exact depth to drill and then recommended that they frack the well using nitroglycerin charges. While this first well never came in, Cayce and his partner’s experiences in the Texas oilfields emboldened them to start Edgar Cayce Petroleum Company in 1920. This company included Major Edwin Wilson who was a cousin of Woodrow Wilson. It is through this family connection that Cayce did a reading for the President after he had suffered his debilitating stroke. Cayce had built his reputation on readings that helped guide doctors to cure ill patients. Unfortunately, Cayce’s readings were not sufficiently precise to allow this company to turn a profit in the oil fields and time away from his family and more consistent (if not more potentially lucrative) opportunities pushed him to give up on his effort to find oil in 1921. Interestingly, some contemporary acolytes of Cayce’s teachings attempted to return to his readings to find the location of the oil fields that Cayce predicted in his readings. They formed a company, Integrative Energy.

Elia Vargas’ article “Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media.” Media+Environment 3 (1) from 2021 is the only piece I’ve seen that has dealt specifically with this Cayce’s involvement in petroleum extraction. I blogged about it a bit yesterday. Vargas’s short article is provocative and evokes some of my ideas about how the very profanity of petroleum grants it sanctity which, like Vargas, I drew partly from my interest in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Negarestani 2008). I had not anticipated Cayce and my interest in pseudoarchaeology to crash headlong into my interest in petroculture, but here we are.

Finally, one thing that carries of from yesterday is the idea of oil as sacred. Of course, people will object. After all, it’s black, it’s opaque, it’s associated with dirtiness, and the profane goals of making money. At the same time, its utter profanity endows it with a particular power. Cayce’s ability to predict the presence of oil at a particular depth and accessed through particular methods has little to do with its sanctity, but the presence of oil as something primordial, autochthonous, and powerful remains deeply compelling.