What specific Cayce readings (with reading numbers) mention timeframes for global change, and how do scholars date them?
Executive summary
Edgar Cayce’s earth-change corpus contains specific reading numbers that commentators and researchers tie to timeframes for global change—most often readings like 195-29 and a cluster that analysts say forecast geophysical upheavals between the mid-20th century and the late 1990s—but those time assignments arise from modern interpreters, not explicit calendar stamps in every trance transcript [1] [2] [3]. Scholars and investigators date Cayce’s prophecies using the readings’ original session dates, cross-references inside the readings, and later interpretive frameworks produced by researchers such as William Hutton, Jonathan Eagle, and Hugh Lynn Cayce; those methods yield contested chronologies rather than a single authoritative timeline [3] [2] [4].
1. Which Cayce readings explicitly get cited with timeframes for global change
The most concrete reading number repeatedly cited in popular and secondary literature is Reading 195-29, which Cayce gave in connection with future weather and ocean current changes and is invoked to support claims about El Niño–style shifts; commentary notes that Cayce “described (reading 195-29) changes that cause the Pacific Ocean’s deep currents to run warmer than normal” [1]. More broadly, books that compile Cayce’s earth-change material refer to “upwards of 44 readings” addressing lost continents, pole shifts, and geophysical change and identify a block of readings interpreted as projecting significant changes in a roughly 1958–1998 window [2]. Popular compendia and later anthologies present collections of Cayce earth-change readings gathered under titles like Earth Changes, which make it easier for modern authors to point to specific numbered readings as forecasting eras of transformation [5] [6].
2. How researchers convert Cayce’s trance material into calendar timeframes
Several methodologies recur in the secondary literature: researchers use the original dates the readings were delivered as anchor points and then read internal cues or prophetic phrasing to project future intervals (a method described in analyses such as Hutton’s and Eagle’s) [2]. Other interpreters compare Cayce’s descriptive language to contemporary scientific events and then assign ranges—Hutton’s work and Hugh Lynn Cayce’s compilations argued for correlations that implied major earth changes “may occur, before the end of 2001” or be concentrated in the late twentieth century [3] [2]. Collections and institutional archives make the raw reading transcripts available, enabling such cross-dating, but the leap from transcript text to a precise modern calendar is an interpretive act performed by later scholars and advocates [4] [7].
3. Major published chronologies and their claims
William Hutton’s and Jonathan Eagle’s analysis frames Cayce as having “upwards of 44 readings” pointing to geophysical changes beginning in a period overlapping 1958–1998, and their book attempts scientific correspondences that map Cayce’s language onto documented events [2]. Hugh Lynn Cayce’s and William Hutton’s Coming Earth Changes explicitly compared Cayce’s forecasts with geophysical data and asserted that Cayce’s pole-shift scenarios were plausible within a timeframe that some editions placed before the end of 2001 [3]. Compilations such as Earth Changes: Historical, Economical, Political, and Global assemble the relevant readings so that later interpreters can derive timelines from grouped prophetic material [5] [6].
4. Scholarly versus advocacy dating—different incentives and methods
Academic historians of religion and scholars who treat Cayce as a cultural phenomenon (for example, those summarized by the Theosophical Society and by historians cited in that review) typically emphasize provenance and context—when readings were given and how Cayce used symbolism—rather than endorsing specific impending dates, while geologically inclined devotees and popular writers favor more assertive calendar assignments that seek correspondence with modern events [8] [3]. Works published by Cayce-affiliated organizations or sympathetic authors tend to present readings as predictive and to date them forward more aggressively, whereas critical or contextual scholarship highlights interpretive leaps and the reliance on correlational rather than deductive dating [4] [8].
5. Limitations, disputes, and what the sources do not settle
None of the provided sources contains a universally accepted catalog that pairs every Cayce reading number with an incontrovertible calendar date; instead, readers find suggested clusters, interpretive timelines, and contested scholarly judgments—so claims that Cayce “predicted” exact years are dependent on later analysts’ methods, not on a single canonical Cayce timetable in the primary transcripts provided here [2] [4] [7]. The materials make clear that dating rests on exegesis: matching imagery in readings to contemporary scientific claims or historical events and assembling those matches into a chronology, an approach that naturally produces divergent timelines and competing agendas among promoters and critical researchers [3] [2] [8].
6. Conclusion
Specific reading numbers such as 195-29 are cited in the literature as addressing future climatic and oceanic changes, and several authors compile roughly 40–50 Cayce earth-change readings that they place in a mid-to-late twentieth-century window [1] [2]. How those readings acquire calendar dates depends on researchers’ choices—using session dates, internal textual cues, and external event-matching—and that interpretive process explains why scholarly treatments produce contested and non-uniform timelines rather than a single, definitive Cayce chronology [3] [2] [4].