“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.

(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.

(Sarah lived 3 doors down the street in a dark front room. She had two brothers, one off someplace, he was a sailor. The other was younger. Sarah’s father did something for the cobbler, so he made shoes for the young brother and she was in the shop to get the shoes.

(Albert and Sarah had 4 children. Two died when they were babies. Those that lived were Billy and Jane.

(The village had been there for 350 years. I told you its name before, Levonshire. I think before that it had a different name. All those invasions, a lot of them came along that coast. There were the Norsemen, and I guess the Gauls. They had sails, big sailboats. The Gauls looked French, swarthy, a lot of them were little men. Everybody knows what the Norsemen were like. That was long before these people I’m telling you about lived there.

(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.

(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?

(The following is an account of the brief vision I experienced during our session of Saturday, January 4, 1964. I had it while sitting quietly in the dark with Jane at our walnut table in the living room. It came before Jane began her recitation about Levonshire, England.