“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I have described those early sessions elsewhere, but here I’m including, instead, a poem that is a dramatic, intuitive statement about my feelings at the time. Actually, several episodes are condensed into one in the poem. Seth didn’t really announce himself until we had worked with the Ouija board four times. And it was in the middle of the eighth session that I began to speak for him. Almost from the beginning, however, I did anticipate what the board was going to “say,” and the poem is as valid as any strictly factual statement I could make about those sessions — if not more so.

“This thing will never work,” I said.
“We must be out of our minds,”
But we weren’t, at least not yet.
The cat smiled but didn’t say anything.

“You may call me Seth,” the letters spelled.
Rob looked up but didn’t speak.
The cat strolled about in the warm lamplight.
“The coffee must be done,” I cried.

Actually, the board first gave a few messages from a personality called Frank Withers, who insisted that he had known our neighbor, Miss Cunningham. I didn’t take this very seriously at first, but he also said that he knew an elderly woman who worked with me at the local art gallery where I had a part-time job. When questioned, this woman told me that she had known such a man, though he had merely been an acquaintance.

I’m rather embarrassed now by the fact that we turned the lights off, since our sessions and classes are always conducted in normal light. In those days, though, we didn’t know how to proceed, and we had read that such affairs were conducted in near-darkness. Rob and I sat at my wooden table with only a small electric candle lit. After quite some time, I began to see pictures, and as Rob took notes, I spoke aloud in my own voice, describing what I was seeing and experiencing. This was the resulting monologue:

“Her parents weren’t there, and Sarah didn’t live there either!”

“The fishermen had plain wooden boats and piles of fish on a good day. Black fish, some of them only a few inches long, some much longer, averaging maybe a foot in length. There was fishing all year long. It wasn’t seasonal. The water was warm in the winter. That’s why it was so foggy. They didn’t farm too much because the ground was poor and rocky, very hilly; so they depended on fish.”

“I see tomatoes, but even as I say it, it seems to me once that I read that people didn’t eat tomatoes in those days. But yes, the people in the small villages did; and wheat and barley. They had cows.

“There was a boy in the shop, too — not their son, an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert Lang. He was eleven, I think. The cobbler and his wife had no children. She had trouble with her glasses … most people didn’t wear any. They were handmade; they had to grind the glass. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose …

“It was two days overland by stage, two days by horseback. They made about twenty miles a day. They didn’t like to travel after dark. It was too dangerous; there were too many robbers. So they always stayed at an inn that was about halfway there. It was called Sedgewick. They’d get there by the evening of the first day.

“In the inn there was a huge fireplace. Their dishes were made of earthenware. They had ale … it was served with meals. Their meat was ribs — mutton ribs — and something called ‘braunsweiger.’ They had bread … barley bread and soup … fish soup and mussels. They didn’t have salt. They had beans; I don’t know what kind.

Suddenly I started laughing. I was seeing this pistol very clearly. But I have absolutely no interest in guns and no knowledge of them at all, so it was difficult to explain how the pistol was made. I didn’t know the names of the parts. It seemed incongruous that I could have a “vision” of such a simple object and then not have the vocabulary to describe it.

“They … they made bullets and put powder into them. The powder and bullets were kept separate until they were put into the gun, though one or two bullets were always kept ready. They saved the bullets if they could find them, after firing. The metal was hard to get. The guns were awfully heavy. These bullets were something new. They didn’t last; they stopped making them. For some reason I don’t understand, the bullets might explode. The men didn’t want to keep the powder and bullets together. Sometimes the powder was rusty and sometimes whitish. They were big bullets — one of the reasons the guns were so large.

“The people didn’t go to London often. Some never went at all. The first Sarah, who died at seventeen, never went. Albert’s Sarah went. King Edward was in London then. Albert and Sarah did well and could afford to go. When Edward was crowned, they made the trip. They didn’t see the coronation. She was forty-one and he was forty-six at the time. They had two or three children. I don’t know what happened to them.

I was quiet again. Rob didn’t know exactly what to do, so he just asked the first question that came into his head. “Were the people happy?”

“That’s a silly question,” I retorted, but with a great impartiality; it didn’t seem that it was me replying at all. “They were as happy as anyone else then. They didn’t like their babies dying, but they just thought that … that was life. They drank a lot. Most of them couldn’t read. Well, the sexton could some, not much. People didn’t think it was necessary. They didn’t have books, so what good did it do to learn to read?

“A few could write their names, but usually they couldn’t read other people’s names. … They didn’t have water to drink. There was salt in the ocean — that’s why they washed there. But they thought that drinking water was unhealthy. It was hilly and rocky behind the village, but there was a stream up there, and they went up with horses and buckets. But they didn’t drink the water. They drank ale. They made soups from the water, though, and they were lucky that the stream came down from a high place. Otherwise they’d have had to dig down too far.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.