“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The regular 11th session, scheduled for Monday, December 23/63, was not held for various reasons. The main one of course was the fact that the holidays were close at hand; and beside having company we also did some traveling. Thus the regular schedule was broken, and required some effort on our parts to restore. We did not manage to resume until this unscheduled session of January 1; and by then we wondered whether we could resume.

(However, once the three of us began talking about a “seance” [a word I did not want to use describing our sessions and experiments], getting into the mood, we found ourselves trying things that ordinarily we might not have considered.

(This account will also draw from the chapter on seances in Jane’s projected book on ESP. She made detailed notes on our amateur seance the day after it took place, when her memory was fresh. And she will check over this account before it goes into the record.

(We began by sitting at a small table in our living room. We had covered the table with a dark material. Our kitchen opens off the living room, so we closed the blinds in both rooms, and pulled the curtains over them. Not knowing just how to go about a seance, we had a small red electric Christmas candle on. Our rooms have white walls also, so we could still see fairly well once our eyes became adjusted.

(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.

(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.

(We had turned no lights on during break. Now Seth rather imperiously commanded us to move our little table over a few feet so that it faced the doorway to our bathroom. Looking back, Jane, Bill, and I recall with some humor that we docilely followed Seth’s every order. The three of us sat shoulder to shoulder, staring into the bath, which is large and tiled with white. We were hoping to see a materialization of some kind in the open doorway, since we had discussed this at break.

(“Now,” Seth said, “look into the mirror.” The red candle was still on, though hidden behind the curtains. Since the mirror is tall and narrow, we had to crowd in close on three sides of the little table, in order to see our reflections. But we could pick them out. Jane sat in the middle. Her lips were very close to my ear as she talked now; I could hear and feel each breath she took, each swallow she took; her voice dropped considerably in volume and I had the sensation that she was indeed speaking for someone else.

(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.