“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My house was in the busiest, northwestern part of the city, just beyond what you would call the heart of town. Among my wares I sold bells for donkeys. This may not sound like a very grand product, and yet families on the farms outside of Rome found these highly useful. Each had a special sound, and a family could tell by the sound of the bell their own donkey from innumerable similar ones.

The Romans had no clear idea of the number of Jews in Rome at that time. They went by guesswork. The bells on donkeys belonging to the Zealots had upon them the symbol of an eye (Jane, as Seth, pointed to one of her eyes). They came secretly into town, hiding as much from other Jews as from Romans. They were good bargainers and often did me out of more than I deserved to lose.

The Christians, generally speaking, did not want Roman converts. I was later one of these, and because of my nationality was never trusted. My part in that drama was simply to acquaint myself with its physical foundation; to be a participant, however small, in that era. Much later in your terms I would end up as a minor pope in the third century, meeting again some of those I had known — and, if you will forgive a humorous note, once more familiar with the sound of bells.

(“There were two brothers strongly united in control of Italy at the time. Perhaps I should say two males, one in the higher capacity and the other his chancellor, with whom I was involved as Pope; and I sent armies to the north also.

(“We had not yet begun the strong insistence upon indulgences, so I did not have that extra cash that indulgences would bring in. I believed and did not believe, as you [to a class member] earlier believed and did not believe, and I did a good job of hiding from myself what I believed and what I did not believe. And the higher one gets in power, the harder it is to hide such things from one’s self.

My lives as monks followed my experience as a pope, and in one of these, I was a victim of the Spanish Inquisition. My experience in female lives varied from that of a plain Dutch spinster to a courtesan at the time of the biblical David, to several existences as a humble mother with children.

(Jane sat half in trance, “seeing more stuff now than in the session itself.” It was as though a light within her focused upon one small area. She saw grease or wax from a candle, falling upon one of the robes and staining it. In the stall there were long oval bundles of straw, stacked one upon another “to keep it dry, pretty high up to the roof. Each bundle is tied but not covered.”

(Now she smelled something very rancid. “Seth has some kind of soap with his wares — some awful mixture with lye and rosewater,” she said, unbelieving, her nose wrinkling. “This was in some kind of woven sack; a double one like you’d throw over a horse…. I can almost see it in front of me. I could draw the shape of it, though it’s not any big deal.