A.R.E. Visitor Center - 2nd Floor

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The first thing you may notice on the second floor of our Visitor Center building is the beautiful and unique painting by artist Ingo Swann. Swann was a great admirer of Edgar Cayce’s who was fascinated by his readings given on what are called “aura charts,” in which Cayce used personal symbolism to describe other incarnations that were relevant to a person’s present life.

The images depicted in this painting represent the soul’s journey of Edgar Cayce when read from bottom to top, showing incarnations that held the greatest influence on his life. You can read more about the images on our wall display next to the painting.

To the left, you’ll see a painting of a young Edgar Cayce and his wife, Gertrude, who was forever at his side during his readings. The painting includes a bible, which played an important role in Edgar’s spiritual life and was something he read from cover to cover once for every year of his life. To either side of their portrait are their aura charts.

Also here on the second floor is the A.R.E.’s Library—a living memorial to the life and work of Edgar Cayce, whose more than 14,000 psychic readings form the core of its collections. In addition to the Cayce readings, the Library houses the original Cayce couch on which his readings were conducted, more than 75,000 volumes in the field of metaphysics, and acquired private collections on like-minded topics, including the Egerton Sykes collection, which is one of the largest collections in the world on the topic of Atlantis. Please spend some time exploring our library.