“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(It was already dark outside, but we pulled our blinds and put one red Christmas light on. We sat at our dark-topped walnut table in the living room. Upon it we had spread a triangular piece of black cloth. We also wore dark clothing. On the cloth we lay Jane’s wedding ring. It was very dimly visible; we sat opposite each other, hands flat upon the cloth and sometimes touching, with the ring always visible between our hands. We sat quietly. Nothing happened, though we felt we might be cultivating a mood. After a while we substituted for the ring a Spanish-American military insignia, of brass, that Jane’s grandfather had secured from his brother. It was part of a medal; Jane had polished it the day before, and removed the ribbon.

(Now Jane remarked that at times as she sat at the table, her hands seemed to disappear; that is, she could no longer see them, although she was not worried that they did not exist. At times, she observed the same phenomena with the metal insignia. She also stated that she could still “do something” tonight, but after an hour of silence without results thought that some kind of communication, or talking, was necessary to achieve it. We took a break.

(We resumed at 8:40. I began to ask Jane questions at random. She answered each one, and if one of her answers suggested a line of thought I followed it up. Sitting in the darkness, we talked thus for a few minutes. The lights were off, but by now we could see fairly easily. The room was not pitch black. I had laid pen and paper by my elbow, and now I reached for them.

(They had windows in the front room, though—and benches and a stone floor. It was a stone house with a fireplace in it. It was September, damp and foggy in the afternoon, about four o’clock. Sarah Wellington was blond—she had stringy hair, she wasn’t pretty, but bony. She was 17.

(Her father and mother weren’t there. Sarah didn’t live there, she was just in there. She lived 3 doors away. How long did she live? She died at 17, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. The cobbler came out of a back room into the front room and there she was, all in flames and screaming. The cobbler shoved her out in the street and rolled her over on the stones and in the dirt, but she died.

(The fishermen had plain wooden boats, not canoes. I don’t know what kind of fish it was, but they had piles of it on a good day. Blackish fish, some of it only a few inches long, some much longer, averaging maybe a foot in length. Yes, they had fish 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 and very hilly, so they depended on the fish.

(The name of the village was Levonshire. It had less than 300 people. It was very rocky there. It was on the northeast coast of England. The people there used to get food also from another village farther north. For some reason the land was better there. What did they grow? Yes, I see tomatoes. But as I say it I remember reading that they didn’t eat tomatoes in those days. But yes, the people in the smaller villages ate them. And there was wheat and barley. They had nice cows.

(There was a boy in the shop too. He wasn’t their son, just an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert, Albert Lang. He was 11, I think. The cobbler and his wife didn’t have any children. She had trouble with her glasses. This was strange, because most people didn’t have them. I don’t know where she got them, in another town, but they weren’t very good. Handmade, they had to grind the glass and stuff. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose.

(I can more or less see the main street. I see houses and a couple of shops, then a narrow cobbled walk raised up high—it was a partly dirt road built up of rocks and stones that ran around an inlet from the sea. But it was never flooded, the road kept the village dry. There wasn’t any sandy beach. No, I wouldn’t know it if I saw it, it’s not there now. I don’t think I’d know the spot. It was just this little inlet, with the rocky hills and not much grass. It wasn’t a seaport, big ships couldn’t get in close. There was just room enough for their little boats to go out after fish.

(The people didn’t go to London often. Some never went at all. The first Sarah who died at 17 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 being crowned they went to London. They didn’t see the coronation, they were just common people but they wanted to be there. Everybody was excited.

(They went in a coach. She was 41 and he was 46. They had 2 or 3 children. I don’t know what happened to them. The few people I can tell you about must have died. Albert-Ralph—liked to hunt because he was used to guns and knew about them. But he couldn’t get much because the ground was too rocky. Deer and rabbits, a special kind, no big tails, gray hares of some kind. And there were gray squirrels.

(And Sarah, the first one, if she hadn’t burned to death she would have died anyhow at 17. It’s so funny, but she had tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyhow. The land was very rocky, and they just would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. They had dogs and cats.

(Young Sarah’s dress was dirty. It was of wool, and a brown natural color because it wasn’t dyed. It wouldn’t have burned so, but it had grease on it, the grease caught the flames.

(The descendants of the invaders lived in the village too. There was the Laverne family, and De Nauge, and the Breims. They slept on hay. It was so damp it wasn’t healthy, it was too foggy. The hay was never dry. There were many children around. Families that could had a cow. Were the people happy? That’s a silly question. They were as happy as anybody else. They didn’t like their babies dying, though, but they just thought it was life. They drank a lot—ale. No school, they couldn’t read. Well, the sexton, he read some but not much, nobody else could. They didn’t think it was necessary. They didn’t have books, so what good did it do to be able to read?

(A few could write. They could write their own names but they couldn’t read others’. Sometimes a family would have a son go away to learn to write. Then he would teach his parents to write their names, but not often.

(They didn’t have water to drink. There was salt in the ocean, that’s why they washed in the ocean. But they didn’t think it was healthy to drink water. It was hilly and rocky behind the village but there was a stream up there, and they went up there with horses and buckets. But they didn’t drink the water. They drank ale. They made soups out of the water but never thought of drinking it. They were lucky, too. They had a stream that came down from a high place. They’d have had to dig down too far for water otherwise.

(But they boiled the water when they made soups and kept it cleaner that way. This killed a lot of germs. The fish were always available. So they were a lot healthier than other communities that actually had more water. These other places were sicker because the water was polluted. They used natural liquids from the animals when they made stews.

(I saw the feet of a man walking along a flat dusty reddish road. He was I think barefoot, though I wondered about some kind of rudimentary sandal. He carried no staff, and had what was apparently a brownish long robe flapping about the calves of his legs. The legs were thin. I could not see the man’s head or shoulders, or even his waist. The land was very flat, reds and browns. There was nothing but horizon in the far distance on the left side, beyond the feet.