“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. Seth’s idea that in their play children “try to imagine what death is like” certainly adds an intuitive dimension to my own activities as a child. “Cowboys and Indians” was our gang’s favorite game back in Sayre in the late 1920s, and as we roamed the nearby fields all of us made believe we killed our enemies and/or were killed ourselves. We had great fun, and used to play such games to the point of exhaustion.

Jane added that her group of playmates hadn’t engaged in the same sort of games that mine had. “We might have played dead now and then—you know, lain down and closed our eyes, but that would be all.” In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. “I used to play being her all by myself,” she said. “I’d be brave and scornful, knowing I was going to be beheaded—that sort of thing.”