This Is How Mystic Edgar Cayce Predicted The End Of The World

Apocalypses come in all sorts of flavors. You've got your standard-fare zombie apocalypse with maybe the slow zombies, the fast zombies, or the mushroom zombies from "The Last of Us." You've got ancient tome-and-prophecy apocalypses like from the Book of Revelation, Nostradamus, or the Mayan 2012 the-calendar-is-ending-and-so-is-the-world-therefore apocalypse. You've got death by climate disaster, asteroid impact, nuclear weapons, pathogens, robot uprising, or maybe an elite death squad of really aggressive seagulls. Basically, it really does seem like people are obsessed with figuring out how we're all going to bite it.

And then there's Edgar Cayce, one of the more well-known 20th-century psychics, soothsayers, visionaries, etc. Cayce, like many, thought the world was going to end. Of course, it will definitely end when our sun loses its hydrogen and expands into a red giant and consumes Earth in 5 billion years — but Cayce meant before then. And what terrestrial fate did Cayce's visions reveal? The truth is, it's a little bit of all of the above, minus some more of the wacky bits like mushroom zombies.

As Forbes says, Cayce predicted that the world's last gasp would result from a magnetic polar reversal, when the north and south poles flip — or at least shift. As the British Geological Survey says, these are not actually super uncommon -— there have been about four or five flips every million years within the past 10 million years. Cayce, however, said that the shift was just one disaster of several.

To be clear, Edgar Cayce wasn't your run-of-the-mill strip mall psychic. According to Lethbridge News Now, he gave over 14,000 readings throughout his life and grew to public fame and acclaim within the United States. He had a particular interest in diagnosing illness and was apparently pretty accurate at it. He claimed to get many of his visions, insights, prophecies, what have you in his sleep, which earned him the nickname "The Sleeping Prophet." He would also sleep, as Eightify says, on top of books to purportedly psychically soak up their knowledge. He also ignited interest in the lost civilization of Atlantis and related mystical like that of Indigo Children, per the Christian Research Institute. And of course, because no psychic resume would be complete without it, he made some predictions about the end of the world.

In Cayce's case, his apocalypse of choice boiled down to magnetic pole shifts. Forbes says that Cayce envisioned a 16- to 20-degree shift in the poles. The north and sole poles sit at 90 degrees away from each other on opposite ends of Earth, so a shift like the one he describes wouldn't be a "flip" so much as it would be a "slip," like your foot slipping on ice. And what would the slip cause? A simultaneous volcano explosion: Mt. Etna volcano in Italy and Mt. Pelee in Martinique. This volcano would then send floods crashing against coastlines. Bye bye, people.

[Featured image by via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled]

So is there any credibility to Edgar Cayce's prediction of magnetic pole shifts causing volcanos, floods, etc.? While it makes for a more plausible apocalypse than aliens invading Earth from their subterranean moon base, ultimately: Not really.

We did mention that magnetic pole reversals are not uncommon, at least by geological time (a really long time). In fact, Phys.org says that the last reversal happened very recently, around 41,000 years ago. At that time, Earth's magnetic field lines — the loops spinning oppositely from the north and south poles — flowed oppositely for about 440 years. Actual polarity (the location of the north and south poles) changed for 250 years. We've got evidence of weird volcanic activity at both Greenland and the Black Sea from 39,400 years ago, and a really big volcanic explosion near Naples that sent ash all the way to central Russia. And yes, ScienceDaily says that changes to heat flow in Earth's mantle correspond to magnetic pole changes. And also yes, Cosmos Magazine explains that the motion of molten metals through Earth's core creates our wonderful magnetosphere that protects us from cosmic radiation.

However, volcanos erupt all the time. Logically Facts discusses how recent volcanic explosions like those in Iceland, for instance, are not evidence of changes to Earth's magnetic poles — they are totally normal and happen all the time. The British Geological Survey also says that magnetic pole changes wouldn't result in anything catastrophic, anyway.