“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I asked Jane to lay her wedding ring on the table. The three of us joined hands around it. Sitting quietly in the dim light, staring at the ring, I realized that the unwary observer might not have too much trouble seeing whatever he wanted to see.

“Then suddenly Jane announced in a firm clear voice, ‘Watch the hand.’ It was a command, and I knew that Seth was with us. Jane felt her hand grow cold. With considerable relish Seth, through Jane’s voice, described in detail each effect that followed—so that, he said, there would be no doubt as to what happened.

“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, there was no mistaking the change.

“Jane’s wrist did thicken. She sat with the wrist of her left hand pressed to the tabletop. She wore a black sweater with the sleeves half pushed up and the cold white light spread up over the thickening wrist, up her forearm, to the sweater.

“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.

“ ‘Now the hand changes again,’ Seth said. ‘It becomes a stubby fat one. Frank Withers had a hand like that, just like that. Frank Withers was a fathead,’ he said, with great satisfaction, even though Frank was, according to Seth, a personality fragment of his own entity.

“The hand did become stubby and fat for a moment. Then it resumed the pawlike shape. ‘Now,’ Seth said to me, ‘very carefully reach out and touch the hand. I want you to touch it, so that you can feel what it is like.’ Gingerly, I touched my fingertips to Jane’s palm. The pawlike hand felt very cold, wet and clammy, and the skin had a bumpy feeling that I wasn’t used to in Jane’s hand.

“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.

But as soon as the séance was over, I was appalled. Instead of being encouraged by Seth’s part in the events, we were upset. We all knew what we had seen. Rob had even touched the hand at one time, and Seth had given us many occasions to check effects as they occurred. We couldn’t accept the evidence of our senses, nor could we really deny such obvious evidence. Though we were trying the experiment for the book, we thought that seances were kooky, somehow unrespectable. We didn’t want Seth involved, and specifically had made a point of not asking for him.

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.

Then, with strong humorous accents he spoke about the Ouija board which we still used to open and close sessions. “It is a matter of formality in that it renews contact in a familiar manner, and also, I have always been partial to formality to some extent. The board gives us a breathing spell and is a method of saying good day or good evening, or tipping one’s hat. I’m also of the opinion that small ritual tends to emphasize data in the mind, and set it off to advantage, in the same way that good cuisine is set off by fine dishes. … At the end of a session it would be most cordial to touch your hands briefly to the board. You’re lucky that I don’t request you to wear full-dress clothing.”