“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
THREE:

Seth Comes to a Seance—
A “New” Set of Fingers

“Then the hand began to change its general proportions and resembled 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 that the fingers were merely folded over.

“Slowly the hand regained normal shape. Jane still sat with her palm up. Now Seth really extended himself. The fingers began to elongate noticeably and to whiten. Then a second set of fingers began to rise up over Jane’s own fingers. Now it could have been easy enough for Jane to bend her own fingers into this position, but here the three of us now saw the second set rising up long and white. Moreover, this second set had the fingernails on top. Had they been Jane’s own fingers, the nails would have been on the undersides and invisible.

“ ‘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 looked waxen, almost wet, as though freshly molded. Jane did not appear to be frightened. Then, gradually, the extra set of fingers disappeared.

“Seth now had this cold inner light suffuse Jane’s wrist and palm to an even more remarkable degree. At the joining of hand and wrist, the flesh rose up in an egglike lump. The white crept up Jane’s arm to the sweater, and bled down her fingers, until all semblance of shadow was gone from the arm and palm. Then to end this part of the demonstration, Seth had Jane place her hands side by side on the table, so that we could plainly see the difference between the two. Gradually the hand returned to normal, and Seth instructed us to take a rest period.

When Seth took over, his confidence knocked all other ideas or doubts from my mind. Yet my eyes were open all the while. I could examine the differences between my hands, for example, and see the other set of fingers, and the white glow that ran up to the edge of my rolled-up sweater. I seemed to “click out” when Seth spoke, yet a tremendous sense of energy rushed through me as he did so. Except for the mirror image at the end, nothing bothered me.

My intellectual skepticism was aroused simply because the affair had been so successful. We argued back and forth as to whether or not suggestion could have been responsible, but we knew that this could not explain half of what happened. It could hardly explain the bumpy quality Rob had felt in my hand, or the second set of fingers, though we decided that it could perhaps have accounted for the odd mirror image.