This psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 115 West 35th Street, Virginia Beach, Va., this 4th day of July, 1928, in accordance with request made by self - Mr. [900].

Present: Edgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. L. B. Cayce.

TEXT

1. EC: We have the body, the enquiring mind, [900] - this we have had before. The dreams, the visions, the studies mental of the body, are keeping him much in touch with that which is aiding and abetting the body physical, the body mental; and the spiritual elements give each that which is bringing better conditions in every manner to the body. This is seen in the various forces as have entered in, to make manifest in the expanding of the consciousness of the entity those forces that are being manifest through same. These are presented in the manner that the entity may gain the more, APPLIED in active forces, for the understanding of the body-consciousness.
2. Ready for dreams.
3. (Q) Last week. "I told you he wanted to get into society and you would hear from him again." It seemed to have to do with Joe Warner. It seemed the Ku Klux were shooting pistols at me, and I said, "Why don't you hit me with one of the bullets?" They said, "We will sue you for libel."
   (A) This as presented to the entity, taken in the light of that as GIVEN respecting Warner, should be interpreted to the consciousness of the entity itself. That the unreasonableness of libel from the body Warner is as unreasonable as would be presented by those forces as are indicated to the consciousness physically of the body of the Ku Klux as respecting slander to the body, see? This, then, indicates that the conditions as have been outlined for the activities of the body will be in keeping with that as has already been presented. Do that.
4. (Q) Saw a child, and something about a diphtheria germ and danger of diphtheria.
   (A) That is indicative rather of the development of that which may be gained in study through the channels the entity, body, consciousness is entertaining, in the study of the phenomena being expended through those forces the entity is interested in. That such fields as this may be entered by the entity in the study of the application of forces for the welfare of man, even as that which prevents diphtheria in its spread among children - see?
5. (Q) Seemed loading up with a lot of department store stuff in a taxi cab.
   (A) These, then, presenting that the various industrial forces are ready to take their ride with the changes as will be presented. That as these are given to the body from day to day, in the activity even as was seen in that presented, in that all could be sold but one - being trouble with the market - then, as these are presented, in their various forces and forms, the activities of the body respecting same should be in that channel from day to day. Heed that given. For, as seen, these may be used and applied in the manner as has been presented.
6. We are through for the present.

REPORTS

1. 7/06/28 EC's letter to Mr. [900], apparently referring to a telephone conversation:
   "You spoke of Patience Worth. The lady through whom this information comes [Mrs. John Curran] I have known of for many years, and met her personally. I first contacted her in St. Louis, where she lived. It was she that Lodge was to see when I first met him. [Sir Oliver Lodge] She gave me one of the first books that was ever published, which was fostered, I believe, by the editor of one of the papers in St. Louis. I don't know whether you have seen the book or not. If you haven't, I'll show it to you when you are down."
2. 1/26/50 Norfolk, Va., Ledger-Dispatch? or Virginian-Pilot?:
   PITCHING HORSESHOES By Billy Rose
   THE RIDDLE OF PATIENCE WORTH
   Next time you meet a fellow who doesn't believe in anything he can't measure with a slide rule, ask him to give you a logical explanation of documented case history of Patience Worth...
   On a July evening in 1913, two St. Louis housewives, a Mrs. John Curran and a Mrs. Emily Hutchings, were amusing themselves with an ouija board - a parlor pastime as popular then as canasta is now. Suddenly Mrs. Curran felt a strong pressure on her hands and the pointer began to spell out a message: "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name."
   When the skeptical housewife asked to know more about the lady at the other end of the line, the board immediately answered that Patience Worth had been born in Dorsetshire, England, in 1694, and had always wanted to be a writer.
   SO BEGAN the strangest literary collaboration in the history of psychic phenomena, and during the next 15 years, with Mrs. Curran acting as medium, Patience Worth turned out four full-length novels and almost 2,500 poems - 3,000,000 words in all.
   The first novel, "A Sorry Tale," was published by the reputable and unsensationally-minded firm of Henry Holt and Company, and when the New York Times reviewed it on July 8, 1917, it said, "This long and intricate tale of Jewish and Roman life during the time of Christ is constructed with the precision and accuracy of a master hand. It is a wonderful, a beautiful and noble book."
   The second novel, "Hope Trueblood," was the story of a peasant girl in 17th Century England, and it was extolled by a London reviewer as "a landmark of fiction." ... and in "Braithwaite's Anthology of Poetry for 1917," there were three poems by Vachel Lindsay, three by Amy Lowell, one by Edgar Lee Masters, and five by Patience Worth.
   The easy explanation for this phenomenon, of course, is that the St. Louis housewife was a talented writer who had invented the story of Patience Worth to get herself a little publicity. But before you make up your mind, consider the following.
   AT THE BEGINNING, Mrs. Curran got her messages via the ouija board a letter at a time, but halfway through the first book, she began to "see" whole words and sentences, and from then on she dictated to her husband at the rate of 110 words per minute...and hardly a dozen of the 3,000,000 words were of a vintage later than the 17th Century.
   A great deal of her writing was done in the presence of reliable witnesses and investigators, and etymologists who examined her prose and poetry testified that it was impossible, without years of study and training, for a person to compose as much as a short story in 17th Century English. Moreover, they unanimously agreed that the middle-class housewife who had never gone to high school and never been out of Missouri was the last person in St. Louis to write a 70,000-word narrative in iambic blank verse in 70 hours.
   MANY OTHER oddish facts about this medium confused the psychologists and non-believers who came to investigate. Mrs. Curran often worked on three or four stories simultaneously, and would skip from one to the other in the course of a sitting without losing track of the narratives... and once, when her husband mislaid an early chapter of "A Sorry Tale," Patience Worth obligingly dictated it all over again.
   In St. Louis in 1920, before an audience of writers scientists and civic leaders at the Artists' Guild, Patience Worth was asked through Mrs. Curran to make up a 25-line poem, each line beginning with a different letter of the alphabet - which she did without faltering, going from "a" to "z" and leaving out the letter "x" as per instruction.
   WHO WAS PATIENCE WORTH? Well, various researchers went into this carefully and reported that a girl by that name was born in 1694 in Dorsetshire County, England; that some 30 years later she migrated to America, and was killed during an Indian attack in King Phillip's War...and that many of the architectural landmarks referred to in her novels are still standing in Dorsetshire, and local records indicated that others had existed around 1694. Patience Worth stopped communicating with Mrs. Curran in 1928, and Mrs. Curran died nine years later, but to this day nobody has been able to successfully ridicule this greatest-of-all literary riddles. Many psychologists agree with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society for Psychic Research who, after spending considerable time on the case, said, "Either our concept of what we call the subconscious must be radically altered so as to include potencies of which we hitherto have had no knowledge, or else some cause operating through, but not originating in, the subconscious of Mrs. Curran must be acknowledged."
3. 6/06/66 [...]'s ltr. to Librarian:
   Librarian, A.R.E.:
   Thanks for sending "'Patience Worth' - a psychic mystery." I am returning it to you parecelpost today.
   With it I am sending a book "The Pot Upon The Wheel" by "Patience Worth". - I had thought I had another book by Patience Worth which I wished also to give to A.R.E. Library but it is gone, I suppose we loaned it years ago - & you know what!
   I consider Casper Yost's book about Patience Worth and Mrs. Curran of St. Louis an excellent, objective and honest piece of reporting spendidly organized.
   My wife Eleanor, (a member of A.R.E. and, with me, a friend of Edgar Cayce there at Virginia Beach), was a journalist. Among many another, she went to St. Louis, interviewed Mrs. Curran, sat with others throughout a number of ouija board sesssions. That was about 1914 or 1915. Sorry we have no clippings of her stories about the interviews etc. from the newspapers she wrote for. She said that Mrs. Curran was completely ethical, genuine; that Mrs. C. may have had clairvoyance or other psychic powers independently but seemed not to use them consciously, if indeed she had them. There was no charlatanism or hanky-panky of any kind whatever about Mrs. Curran.
   Patience Worth was a psychic mystery sure enough to Casper Yost and so she was to Mrs. Mitchell. She is much less so to anyone who knew Edgar Cayce and know the Readings. But Mrs. Mitchell and I had never heard of EC in those days, indeed not until some 25 years later.
   I am writing this out as perhaps you keep files on the subject of Patience Worth & Mrs. Curran.
   Sincerely [...]

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