“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(With considerable relish Seth described in detail each phenomena that followed—so that, as he said, there would be no doubt as to what took place. He began by telling us to watch Jane’s thumb. The tip of it began to glow. It seemed to be an internal suffusing of the flesh with a cold white light; there was no radiant effect, merely the changing color of the flesh itself.

(Since the hand was in shadow to begin with, there was no mistaking the change.

(The glow spread up the length of the thumb to the mound of flesh at its base, next to the palm. “Watch the mound,” Seth repeated with more than a little satisfaction. “Watch the mound. See the color change, see the shadows in the palm disappear? You have no idea of how difficult this is for me, to reach out to your plane from mine, to perform these little tricks for you. If you want a demonstration you shall have it, silly as it is…”

(Jane’s hand began to change its general proportions. Slowly, with Seth’s monologue in our ears, the hand came to resemble a pawlike shape. I had the eerie feeling of an animal’s forepaw. Jane’s fingers, normally long and graceful, had shrunken to stubby appendages, or so it appeared. The glow suffused the palm, eliminating the shadows normally to be seen there, so that it did not seem the fingers were merely folded over.

(“For a first attempt I’m doing beautifully”, Seth said. “What do you think of that? Take a good look…” For some minutes we studied the effect before us. To me the extra fingers bent so grotesquely up looked waxen, almost wet, as though freshly molded. Jane did not appear to be frightened. She looked down at her own hand and talked steadily. Then gradually the extra fingers withdrew, disappeared. “Now the hand changes again,” Seth said. “It becomes a stubby fat one, a doctor’s short fat stubby-fingered hand… A surgeon’s hand, short and fat.” He repeated this several times. “Frank Watts had a hand like that,” Seth said. “Just like that. Frank Watts was a fathead,” he said with obvious satisfaction, even though Frank Watts was a personality fragment of Seth’s own entity.

(I would estimate that a good hour was taken up by the above proceedings. Usually the changes in shape and color took place quite slowly. Our interest was of course intense the whole time. We did exactly as Seth told us to; often, for instance, I wanted to reach out and grasp Jane’s hand while it was in metamorphosis, but I did not touch it until Seth said to. During the whole time, Jane-Seth spoke constantly. The dialogue, while unmistakably Seth, had the added fillips of an almost macabre wit and a biting sarcasm. Often Seth remarked upon our rather childish desire for demonstrations; yet when I asked him if he would rather we refrained from such requests in the future, he said he understood the desire, that it was natural, and that if he felt like it he would comply.

(“Now the three of you see your reflections in the mirror, just as you should… Now watch closely, for I am going to change Jane’s image in the mirror, I am going to replace it with another. Watch the shape of the head. Closely now, for this is very difficult…”

(We could see our reflections clearly enough, even though dimly. As Jane continued to talk, her image did slowly begin to change in the mirror. Her head began to drop lower between Bill and I. At the same time, the shape of the skull changed, the hair grew shorter and fit around it much more closely. The shoulders of the image in the mirror hunched over, and grew narrower. And then the head tilted and looked down, while Jane stared straight ahead into the mirror.

(There was no doubt that we saw an image in the mirror that sat several inches lower than Jane herself sat, and that the mysterious head would dip down and then hang forward of the body. The strongest impression I had was of the change in proportion of the head, and the sensed or felt alien presence of a snoutlike creature confronting us.

(Jane was quite tired. It was after 10:00 PM. Bill Macdonnel was more impressed with the hand phenomena than the mirror demonstration. To Bill, while he thought he sensed a change in the shape of Jane’s head in the mirror, there was little else to be seen. He did not sense an aura, for example, or receive any impression of an alien countenance.