“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In Turkey you dealt with an order rather than a family—a tribal order, so to speak, with males predominating. It was of a religious and warlike nature, in which the sword predominated. Women had no part to play. Ruburt was the leader of such a group, and you were what could be considered his lieutenant, or closest at hand. The group was given to mystical practices, in which the dictums of Allah were followed—but also those dictums were enmeshed with some old Jewish practices and beliefs.

Moses was considered a saint, for example. The sect was a strange mixture of Mohammedanism, Christianity and Judaism, but it went under the banner of Mohammedanism, and considered Christians in conventional terms as enemies. The Jews were sometimes considered allies, and sometimes not. It was a rich pageantry of beliefs—almost an Oriental Christianity despite the fact that the Christians were considered the true infidels.

Ruburt was used to the unbridled use of power, and at least among the sect his word was law. Reincarnation was also part of the belief structure. It was considered a blight of the gods, for example, to ever return as a woman.

All of that occurred in the background in which you chose an artistic ability that did not fit into the accepted male role, and Ruburt possessed a drive that did not fit the feminine picture, either. You quite concurred with the attitudes involved. Each of you dislike fanatics because you were once so fanatical. Ruburt went to battle with all of his men, and only as he grew older did he begin to wonder at his own motives, or the beliefs that were the structure of his life.

(10:40.) Give us a moment.... Partially it was the belief that women were more vulnerable, and the social conditions—Darwinian and Freudian concepts—that led him to accept that position, and all the material I have given fits in here. There was also the feeling that contemplation and action were self-contradictory.

Very briefly: as a Roman, you pretended to be a follower while you were a man of rank in the military. You had no belief in the conventional gods, yet you were supposed to be conquering lands in their name. You traveled even to Africa. You had a disdain for leaders as liars, and of the masses as followers, and so you were always in one kind of dispute or another, with your fellows, and even with the authorities. You were of a querulous nature, yet highly curious, and again physically involved.

He is obviously more restricted in that regard, but neither have you had a woman you had to escort, so your times were spent thinking, writing, exploring the nature of reality, and affecting society while not being infected by it, according to your concepts and beliefs. More than this, people come to you, as befits your Turkish condition. You do not go to them. Nor do you set up a school for fools—again, according to your beliefs and concepts.

Above all, neither of you wanted the condition to worsen. That is where you drew the line. No condition is stable, but ever-changing. The entire system of beliefs was based upon, again, fear of the spontaneous self on both of your parts—fear that it would lead you where you did not want to go, as if you and it were separate things, or as if its intents were by nature so divorced from your own that you must set up barriers against its expression except in certain acceptable areas.