Edgar Cayce on Giants, Lost Tribes, and other Pre-Columbian Americans

Did you know that Edgar Cayce didn’t just opine on Atlantis, ancient high technology, and the Hall of Records under the Sphinx when he talked about ancient history? Cayce also had some things to say about American prehistory, which he saw as a diffusionist stew of Atlanteans, Hebrews, Inca (!), and Giants. Yes, giants. Let’s take a look at a couple of Cayce’s readings regarding the prehistory of the United States.

First up is reading 1286-1, a psychic reading conducted for a model who wanted to know about her past lives. Cayce determined that the sitter, whom he calls “the entity,” was once a priestess in prehistoric Ohio:

...Before that we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity, during those periods when there were the spreadings of those teachings that had come from the lands from which those peoples came that were known as the Lost Tribes, as well as from Atlantis, Yucatan, the Inca, and the land of On [?]. [Og?]
 
They were portions of the entity’s people then, in that part of the land now known as the central portion of Ohio, during the early portion of the Mound Builders.
 
There the entity was a priestess of those peoples that were a part of the experiences there of those peoples. For while confusions arose from the tenets of the Hebraic as well as the Atlantean, as well as the Inca, these became centralized or localized in the expressions of those peoples and those groups in that particular period of their activity.
 
(Brackets in original transcript)

For Cayce, the Mound Builders were a distinct ancient culture with ties to Israel, Atlantis, and Mu (reading 5750-1)—despite the fact that Mu had only been invented in 1926 from leftover parts of the literature of Atlantis and Lemuria! In his view, which recycles material from nineteenth century Mound Builder myths (which also assigned spurious antiquity to the Inca), a group of Atlanteans settled in the Yucatan, but their offspring moved northward, becoming the Mound Builders. This attempt to connect the so-called Mound Builders (in reality a large number of cultures spread across time and space) to Mexico was a popular theme in nineteenth century popular history, particularly because many at the time believed the high cultures of Mexico to have originated with Europeans, Phoenicians, or, yes, Atlanteans. There is a grain of truth in that there is a cultural continuum across North America and some tenuous connections to Mexico, but no direct evidence of a Mexican origin for the mounds. Stacking dirt in large piles doesn’t require an outside inspiration.
 
Greg Little, a supporter of Edgar Cayce and the author of a book on Cayce and the Mounds, claims that some American mound sites “mimic the layout of the Center City of Atlantis.” Since the only description Plato gave is that Atlantis was arranged in concentric rings of land and water, I can’t see how this is possible.
 
Anyway, you wanted to know about the giants! Well, Cayce wasn’t content merely to have America filled with Inca, Atlanteans, Muvians, and Lost Tribes of Israel. He added something else. He went on to describe his vision of prehistoric southern Florida, a land he claimed was inhabited by Mexican-Atlanteans and the Norse, as well as one more group: “The entity’s sojourns then were with those of a race of unusual height, unusual proportions to what might be termed in the present. For they were then the lords of the land…” (Reading 1298-1).
 
Sadly, this exciting development isn’t quite the lost race of Nephilim Mound Builders fringe historians were looking for. I think Cayce was obliquely referring to the so-called giants that attacked Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in 1528, a standard account of “giants” well-known in the Mound Builder literature: “They go naked, are large of body, and appear at a distance like giants,” the conquistador wrote (source).
 
Cayce, however, was happy to identify the Biblical Nephilim with some of the inhabitants of Atlantis, which Ignatius Donnelly had already declared the “antediluvian world” of the book of Genesis:

These took on many sizes as to stature, from that as may be called the midget to the giants—for there were Giants in the earth in those days, men as tall as (what would be termed today) ten to twelve feet in stature, and in proportion—well proportioned throughout. The ones that became the most useful were those as would be classified (or called in the present) as the ideal stature, that was of both male and female (as those separations had been begun); and the most ideal (as would be called) was Adam, who was in that period when he (Adam) appeared as FIVE-IN-ONE—See? (reading 364-11)

The echo of Genesis 6:4 in Cayce’s aside pretty much explains where his ideas came from, though the late addition of Adam to a world filled with other races is straight out of Helena Blavatsky’s discussion of Adam’s origin in the Secret Doctrine, where she, too, emphasized the separation of a hermaphroditic elder race to create the Aryans.