And in what ways was Cayce a charlatan?
http://www.skepdic.com/cayce.html
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1874/whats-the-scoop-on-edgar-cayce-the-sleeping-prophet
http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/07/08/a-field-trip-to-edgar-cayces-association-for-research-and-enlightenment/
From the first link:
Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey) is known as one of America's greatest psychics. His followers maintain that Cayce was able to tap into some sort of higher consciousness, such as God or the akashic record, to get his "psychic knowledge." He used this "knowledge" to predict that California will slide into the ocean and that New York City will be destroyed in some sort of cataclysm. He predicted that in 1958 the U.S. would discover some sort of death ray used on Atlantis. Cayce is one of the main people responsible for some of the sillier notions about Atlantis, including the idea that the Atlanteans had some sort of Great Crystal. Cayce called the Great Crystal the Tuaoi Stone and said it was a huge cylindrical prism that was used to gather and focus "energy," allowing the Atlanteans to do all kinds of fantastic things. But they got greedy and stupid, tuned up their Crystal to too high a frequency and set off volcanic disturbances that led to the destruction of that ancient world. He made other predictions concerning such things as the Great Depression (that 1933 would be a good year) and the Lindbergh kidnapping (most of it wrong, all of it useless), and that China would be converted to Christianity by 1968. He also claimed to be able see and read auras, but this power was never tested under controlled conditions. However, Edgar Cayce is best known for being a psychic medical diagnostician and psychic reader of past lives.
From the third link:
...Thinking of my daughter, who has Cerebral Palsy, I wondered aloud whether or not Mr. Cayce had done any readings on Cerebral Palsy. Someone passed me the index and I looked it up. There were, indeed, several readings under Cerebral Palsy, subcategorized under “Abnormal Children.”
It was right then that I stopped having fun.
I was not offended by the terminology – Mr. Cayce died in 1945 and I could not fault him for using language which would have been common in his day. No, the fun stopped because I suddenly realized that each of those 14,000 readings represented an actual person. This was a person with a disabled child, an illness or some type of problem. This was a person who chose to spend their money, time and resources to seek help from Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet, who was almost certainly 100% unqualified to help them. And because they spent their money, time and resources on Mr. Cayce, they would have had less money, time and resources to devote to things which might actually have been of some benefit. (end quote)
The man made his living by pretending to have "psychic" powers. He was a cross between a fortune teller and a witch doctor. As I said...a charlatan.