Temple Beautiful

Temple Beautiful is the name of a temple in Egypt that the American psychic Edgar Cayce described in a trance reading in 1935. It is also the name of a place in a 1975 novel about Atlantis. I found both on this site, and I keep them apart here.

My sources are Cayce’s reading 281-25, a few summaries by the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), the Virginia Beach organisation that publishes his readings, and my own review of the novel. A reading is a transcript of what Cayce said in trance. I treat all of it as a claim. I know of no archaeological evidence for the temple.

Where the name comes from

Reading 281-25 was given on 17 July 1935 in Norfolk, Virginia, for the Glad Helpers, a group that studied spiritual healing. The reading opens with the request put to Cayce by Gertrude Cayce, who conducted the sessions. The request already contains the setting.

Then you will have before you the Temple Beautiful in Egypt at about the period 10,500 B.C. after the return of the High Priest RA-TA from banishment. You will describe in detail this temple and the services held in it, explaining how an understanding of the work carried on there may be of help to us now in carrying forward our healing study and work.

Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25 (17 July 1935), request by Gertrude Cayce

The date of about 10,500 BC and the high priest Ra-Ta come from the question, not from Cayce’s answer. Ra-Ta is the Egyptian priest whom Cayce said he had been in an earlier life. I wrote more about him on the Pyramid of Giza page. Cayce’s own answer then describes the temple.

What Cayce says it was

Cayce first separates two temples. People were purified in one and prepared in the other.

In the Temple of Sacrifice there were the altars to cleanse the bodies of those things that hindered in body, that were emblematical of the source of the stumblingblock. In the Temple Beautiful there were the expressions of the service as an activity to maintain and to purify the bodies for the necessary associations of spiritual understandings in material bodies.

Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25

In plain words, the Temple of Sacrifice cleansed the body first. The Temple Beautiful then kept the body pure for spiritual understanding. I describe the first temple on Regenerative ceremonies.

He then describes the building.

It was in the form of the pyramid, within which was the globe – which represented to those who served there a service to the world.

Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25

So the temple was a pyramid with a globe inside it. The globe stood for service to the world. In the same reading Cayce says the outer materials came from the mountains near the upper waters of the Nile. He adds that gold, silver, onyx, iron, brass, silk, satins and linen furnished it, because the most beautiful things of every land were gathered there.

Cayce explains why. The gifts were a reminder, to those who served, of the beauty of service in every land.

The service had music and dance, and the prophetess then gave each person a seal of life.

With the music came then the dance, that enabled those with the disturbing forces and influences to become more erect, upright in body, in thought, in activity.

Then there was the giving by the Prophetess of the seal of life that was set upon each and every one who passed through these experiences, how or in what field of activity the relationships were of an individual to its fellow man in maintaining material existence; being in the world yet not OF the world.

Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25

The reading names a priestess and a prophetess among those who served. It does not explain the “seal of life” any further. It says only that the seal showed in what field of activity a person stood in relation to others.

A later answer lists the seven stages of human development that the temple used as symbols.

The world as the beetle. Birth as the cockerel. The Mind as the serpent. Wisdom as the hawk. The varied activities in the cross, the crown, the gate, the door, the way.

Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25, answer to the question about the symbols

The list names four animals first, then the cross, the crown, the gate, the door and the way. The reading does not match the images to the stages one by one. Please do not confuse the gate and the door with the Beautiful Gate of the Jerusalem temple in Acts 3:2. That is a gate in a different building, and the page Temple in Jerusalem is about that one.

Cayce also says what became of the temple’s work.

The teaching, the preparation, the ministering, the song, the music, the activities that give expression, arise in man's experience from those activities in the Temple Beautiful.

Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25

I read this as saying that later teaching, ministry, song and music grew out of this temple. Near the end of his description Cayce also turns the name into a lesson for the Glad Helpers. A person’s own body, he says, can be “the Temple BEAUTIFUL for thy LIVING Lord”. So in the reading the name also stands for the body kept pure as a temple.

How the A.R.E. summarises it

The A.R.E. describes the Temple Beautiful in a blog post about a workshop. It says people trained there for their highest calling, in science, the arts, education, politics or ministry, and learned the Law of One. The Law of One is the teaching, in the Cayce material, that God is one. The post also says the temple had three tiers and a dome like the night sky with gemstone stars. It says each of seven stations stood for one of the body’s energy centres, and that a priestess helped initiates at every station.

These details are the A.R.E.’s summary, and the post does not say where they come from. Reading 281-25 does mention seven stations, but it does not mention the three tiers, the dome or the energy centres. The book Edgar Cayce’s Egypt (A.R.E. Press, 2004) has a chapter on the temple. I only checked its table of contents, which lists “Description and Ceremonies”, “Stations and Posts” and “Temple Services”. I did not read the chapter.

The Atlantis connection

Cayce puts this temple in Egypt, not in Atlantis. The link to Atlantis comes from other sources.

John Van Auken, who wrote about the Cayce readings, writes that regenerative ceremonies and devices were first used in Atlantis and later became part of Egyptian temple practice. I quote him on Regenerative ceremonies. The A.R.E. blog post says the Temple of Sacrifice used “advanced Atlantean technology”. On the same page I describe the Atlantean crystal, the Tuaoi Stone, that the readings link to rejuvenation. There is more on Tuaoi Stone and on Atlantis: Temples.

So the chain has three steps. First, Atlantis had rejuvenation practices. Second, those practices influenced the Egyptian temples under Ra-Ta. Third, the Temple Beautiful was part of that system, after the Temple of Sacrifice. All three steps are claims, and I have no source that proves any of them.

The Temple Beautiful in a novel

Taylor Caldwell and Jess Stearn use the same name in The Romance of Atlantis (1975). I reviewed the book on The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations. Its names are listed on Cultural Characteristics of Atlantis.

In the novel the Temple Beautiful is not a church, and it is not the Temple of Sati. Sati’s temple is the round public shrine with the eternal fire, the two-hundred-foot pillars and the blue-clad vestals. The Temple Beautiful is the rejuvenation center, where the elite are “rayed back to youth”. It is a small building at the foot of Mount Atla, built around a single room of red crystal that sheds nuclear light left over from the first atom-splitter. An atom-splitter is the novel’s name for an atomic weapon. Almost nobody is allowed inside. In seventy years, two men have taken the full treatment. The Empress who controls it has never taken it herself.

This is a place in a novel, not a historical record. The quotes below are short excerpts for review and study. The page numbers are the printed pages of the Fawcett Crest edition. I follow the chamber through the book in seven parts.

What it does to a body

Page 20. Only a favored few among the elite are even considered. The glands that make the body’s hormones are called the endocrine glands, and the rays act on them.

reactivated the cells and restored the endocrine balance of the glands. Wrinkles disappeared, hair was restored, muscles and circulation renewed, and the years miraculously shorn away, except for what remained in the heart and mind.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 20 (describing the special rays)

The mind is the part the machine will not touch. Lazar says so on his deathbed, and Signar says it again in the room. The body is made young. Memory, remorse, and the tiredness of having lived stay where they are.

Lazar’s limit is on page 18. He says we become jaded with the things that pleasured once, until we want nothing but endless oblivion.

It is enough for man to live the natural span of seventy-five years. There are too many memories to live with when life is prolonged beyond what nature intended.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 18

On page 19 he refuses a third visit.

The gods allow no man to live more than two centuries.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 19

He dies at about two hundred, after two treatments, and tells her the chamber is a political tool, not a mercy. Guard it. Hold it up as the reward for loyalty and achievement. Grant it only once in a lifetime, or it loses its power as a bribe.

Signar is offered twenty-four hours in the chair (page 184). In fifteen or twenty-five years his bones, flesh, eyes, ears, nose, taste, and “reproductive organs” might be those of “a team of bulls,” and he still would not want it. He asks, “What of my mind, my memories of wrongs rendered and received?” Happiness itself becomes a burden “when one remembers all the chapter and verse connected with it.”

Where it stands

Pages 179 to 180. Salustra and Signar walk toward the building.

a relatively small building, at the base of Mount Atla, which overlooked both the College of Total Knowledge and, farther on, the Palace itself.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), pp. 179-180

From that door you can see, in order, the college and then the Palace. The building is at the mountain, not in the temple district and not inside the Palace. The courtiers stay back. Only Salustra and Signar go in.

The site is older than Lamora. Page 182. The original capital of Atlantis was built here, on the ground the first atom-splitter had turned to crystal. This room “is the keystone of all that remains of the early city.” Mount Atla has since “razed three Lamoras.” They rebuilt on the same ground because “we are a stubborn people.” The chamber is what the volcano did not erase.

The door

Page 179.

This door is twelve feet thick and immovable, unless one knows the combination.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 179

Signar sees “a series of knobs in the rock.” Those are for the official opening. She compares it to a bank vault.

Jupia turns the dial opening the door to one particular point, Mahius twists and turns the knob to the second point, and then the Empress makes the third and conclusive move.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 179

Three office-holders, three motions, in that order. The priests, the Assembly, and the crown. Jupia is “normally the custodian of the chamber.” For this visit Salustra sets her aside: “I shall be the only law in this case.”

Lazar did not trust that trio with his own life. His scientists “secretly installed an alternative entry system which he alone controlled.” The key is the necklace, “itself a stimulator,” passed to Salustra with the empire. It is the same seven-colored crystal he wears on his deathbed, the one that “gave renewed energy to the weary,” and the one she later says has been “pressed” hard to meet her own energy during the blackout. The jewel stimulates the body of whoever wears it. It is not the chamber’s ray. It is the private key, and a small dose of the same idea: energy put into flesh from a crystal.

She uses the secret way. Her face comes within six inches of the door. She speaks “sharply in a tongue completely foreign” to Signar. A decibel is a unit of loudness. Page 180:

Certain words, now archaic, uttered at a certain decibel level, set up a vibratory wave which tunes precisely into the frequency under which the door opens and closes.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 180

She adds that there is no magic in it, only the power of a sound wave when it is properly timed. She also says the mist has no influence over it.

The wall groans. The ground trembles. A chink opens at the top. The marble wall descends into a receiving slot. In about a minute the top of the door is level with the ground, and they walk over where the door stood. It closes almost at once behind them. The entourage is left outside the cavern.

On the way out she repeats the same command. The marble section slides down into the slot again, and they step into the open air.

It cannot be forced. Signar asks about explosives, or her solar rays. Lazar had already thought of both.

While one sound wave establishes access to the chamber, any vibration of a sufficiently violent nature to cut through marble would at the same time bring the mountain down on the chamber.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 180

Break the door and you bury the rays. No conqueror, “not even the mighty Signar,” gets a second life by siege. The mist that has killed every atmospheric power system cannot jam this lock, because the wave is tuned to the stone, not sent across the air.

Inside

A long dark corridor, about a hundred yards, then a turn into the room (page 181).

The room is no more than twenty feet square. A rosy glow fills every corner. It opens into smaller rooms. Through one door Signar can make out sleeping quarters and a bathroom, which fits a stay of a full day and night. The main room has benches, chairs, and lounges, and no one in them. No attendant. No slave. The person who is being remade is left alone with the light.

She sits in a cushioned chair piled to her neck and says her father sat there twice. It would not have prolonged his life to sit there again, “as the cells can only regenerate twice.”

Walls, ceiling, and floor are one substance. Signar asks where the red ray comes from, since none of her energy systems are giving light or power. She tells him to look at the room.

It is all a giant ruby crystallized from mountains of stone when the first atom-splitter was detonated in ancient times.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 181

On page 182 she says more.

Out of this furnace of vaporized destruction came the giant red crystal that you stand on and see.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 182

He stares at “the huge wall of radiant red crystal.” The light is the building.

How the crystal was made

Pages 181 to 182. Not designed. Found.

The ancestors fired the first atom-splitter against the dinosaurs. The blast cut “a wide swath of destruction,” and in places it destroyed cities they had not meant to hit. People eventually came back and rebuilt. Those people, and only those people, “stayed younger-looking and lived longer than people elsewhere in the land.”

The effect was limited to one area.

where a combination of factors counteracted the harmful radiation remaining from the explosion and transformed it into something compensatingly good, as nature often does when left alone by man.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 182

The great heat had crystallized mountains of stone into this glass. “Vitreous” means glassy. The glassy substance absorbed, in time, all the beneficial nuclear rays set off when the destructive force was unleashed.

It is now a constant source of radiating, life-renewing rays.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 182

So the sequence is: atom-splitter, vaporized stone, a ruby that drank the useful part of the blast, a population that lived too long, and then a room cut out of that ruby and turned into a state secret. The harmful radiation was cancelled only there. Everywhere else the same weapon left ordinary ruin. Atlantis did not invent the medicine. It fenced the accident.

The dose

Page 181. The initiate is the person who takes the treatment.

The initiate remains in this chamber for twenty-four hours, exposing himself to the crystalline rays which penetrate into each and every cell of the body, from the brain to the little toe

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 181 (first part of the sentence)

Page 183. Standing in the room does almost nothing at once.

It actually takes at least twelve hours for the cells to react, and twenty-four hours for the full-scale treatment to become effective.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 183

They have been inside fifteen minutes. Signar says he already feels invigorated. She calls that suggestion.

No change in the tone of the body, no loss of wrinkles or superfluous skin, is noted for weeks after the chamber treatment. The rays work slowly but surely.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 183

The ceiling on a life is on the same page.

Nobody can safely absorb more than thirty or thirty-six hours of this radiation over an extended period.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 183

Any longer, she says, and the cells overreact beyond the desired point and become subject to “a cancerlike growth,” which brings the victim a horrible death.

Set beside the other numbers, the book is slightly at odds with itself. A full treatment is twenty-four hours. The safe life total is thirty or thirty-six hours, which is one treatment and part of a second. She also says the cells can regenerate only twice, and Lazar was rayed twice, at seventy-five and again at one hundred and forty. Two full days under the rays would be forty-eight hours, past the cancer line she gives Signar. The novel states both limits and does not reconcile them. What is consistent is the caution: one visit is the political rule, two is what Lazar took and what exhausted him, and anything longer is a death by overgrown cells.

The rays do not come through the atmosphere, which is why they still shine during the blackout. They pour out of the walls. There is no switch, no attendant to turn them down, and no separate reactor. You ration them by how long you are willing to sit.

Who is let in

Three people must agree (page 184). The priests, represented by Jupia. The Assembly, represented by Mahius. The Empress, “representing the people.” Only someone all three “consider indispensable to Atlantis’ welfare.” Lazar’s reason for the scarcity, which she repeats: “Nothing is appreciated unless attained with the greatest difficulty.” She adds that she can never agree with the other two.

The record, as she tells it:

• Lazar. Twice. First at seventy-five, again at one hundred and forty. The second time he was already tired and would have preferred to die, but he still had no heir. He refuses a third time and dies at about two hundred.
• Mahius. Once. He begs not to be sent again. “I deserve better at your hands, Majesty.” To Signar she says he had the one experience “and wants no more.” In seventy years he and Lazar are “the exclusive recipients.”
• Jupia. Custodian of the door, and refused as a patient. She has applied many times. Salustra will not consent. “Lamora would be far better for her absence.” On the way out she jokes that she would like to give Jupia more of the chamber than she wants, enough that the old woman’s eye would see no more tragedies in her own crystal.

No woman, until Salustra became empress, “had the opportunity to merit this reward.” The prize was male because only men had been in a position to be called indispensable. Salustra does not take it. “I have no fear of growing old. It is not my destiny.”

Goleta, the physicist, has “earned nomination for the Temple Beautiful” for discovering the health ray (page 61). Nomination is not admission. The health ray is his own invention, a different device, and the book never says he sat in the red room.

Signar. She offers him the next twenty hours, which would make him the third person in seventy years. The pretext is dynastic.

From thy veins, my lord, shall flow the issue of the great Lazar. As the father of a new dynasty, thou surely deservest all that Atlantis can offer.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 184

He hears the irony, asks if she thinks he needs it, and refuses. She says that in fifteen or twenty-five years even his loins may weary. He would still rather keep a mind that can get tired.

The visit itself is not a treatment. Fifteen minutes, her private entrance, no Jupia, no Mahius, the door shut on the courtiers, and then the same word opens the mountain again. She uses the holiest room in Atlantis as a place to talk, and as bait.

How the novel’s temple differs from Cayce’s

The two temples differ on every point I can check:

• Cayce’s temple is in Egypt around 10,500 BC. The novel’s is in Atlantis.
• Cayce’s temple trains and purifies people. The novel’s temple makes old bodies young.
• Cayce’s temple works through music, dance and purification. The novel’s temple works through rays.
• Cayce’s temple has a globe inside a pyramid. The novel’s has a room of red crystal.

I cannot say whether Caldwell and Stearn took the name from Cayce. I found no source that says so. My review notes that Stearn was Cayce’s biographer. That is a fact about Stearn, not proof about the name.

What I take from it

The only source for Cayce’s Temple Beautiful is Cayce himself. The reading is detailed, and it reads like a plan for a training centre with seven stations. I know of no outside check on it. Both the reading and the novel put the care of the body at the centre of a temple. Whether that is a coincidence, I leave as a question.

Sources

• Edgar Cayce, Reading 281-25, 17 July 1935. Text at phantho.de and svpwiki.com.
• Alison Ray, “Experience the Mystical Secrets of Ancient Egypt with Temple Beautiful Recreated!”, EdgarCayce.org (A.R.E., Edgar Cayce Blog).
• Edgar Cayce’s Egypt, A.R.E. Press, 2004. Table of contents, Library of Congress.
• John Van Auken on regenerative ceremonies, quoted on Regenerative ceremonies.
• Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (Fawcett Crest, 1975), pages 18 to 20, 61, and 179 to 184 as given above, and my review.

Related

1. Regenerative ceremonies: the Temple of Sacrifice and the rejuvenation practices in Cayce’s readings.
2. Atlantis’ Readings: what Cayce said about Atlantis.
3. Edgar Cayce: the seer behind the readings.
4. The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations: the novel with its own Temple Beautiful.
5. Atlantis: Temples: temples of Atlantis on this site.
6. Mount Atla: the volcano at whose base the novel’s chamber stands.