“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Not long after I closed my eyes I saw, almost in silhouette, a Roman soldier standing on the top of a square, crenelated tower that formed a corner or angle in a massive stone wall. My position was at ground level. I’d lost all sensation of my body lying on the cot. The scene was very faint, so much so that it might almost be called more of an idea than an image. The sky behind the soldier was darkly overcast; I was aware of very little color. I ‘knew’ that the tower I faced marked the southeastern corner of Jerusalem, and I ‘knew’ that the wall itself was an enormous fortification that had surrounded that ancient city sometime during the first half of the first century A.D.

“As I looked up at the soldier’s head and shoulders, I believe (with some hesitancy) that I confronted another version of myself. The whole thing was so nebulous — I was almost a disinterested observer, as I’d been while perceiving my first three Roman episodes. Perhaps this affair was engendered by a book I’ve just started to read; it contains descriptions of the long siege that Imperial Rome, whose military forces had occupied Palestine for 60 years, began against a rebellious Jerusalem in the year 66. I don’t know whether or not the city had a wall surrounding it earlier in that century, but assume it did.³

(Peter’s statement was soon confirmed by another longtime friend of ours, Sue Watkins,¹² who also knows Peter well. He’d related the entire affair to her some months ago; his original perceptions had taken place over seven years ago, long before Sue had introduced him to Jane and me in 1973. Peter told me after class that my sketches had instantly rearoused his memories, although in his experience he’d seen the event from different angles. Yet, even with those discrepancies, and a few others, Peter believed that the walls in Jerusalem, the battlemented tower, the soldiers that I’d just described and depicted, were all the same as those he’d seen in his own visions of so much earlier.

(Our questions are without end, and Jane and I don’t really think many of them will be answered within our lifetimes. I’ll close this appendix with two more queries that psychically are much more personal and very intriguing: Had Peter Smith viewed the same events on that tower in Jerusalem from the vantage point of the soldier who killed my soldier? Were the slain and the slayer meeting now once more, under different circumstances?)

3. Yes, I learned from several reference works containing photographs, drawings, and maps, Jerusalem before A.D. 50 had been walled in. Not once but several times, and in various peripheries enclosing various portions of that ancient site: the old city, the new city, the upper and lower cities, and so forth. Aerial photos show that now, at least, there’s more than one southeastern corner of the city formed as the battlemented, meandering southern wall turns north in a series of steps or right angles. I could see no recent indications of towers there. However, the situation way back then would have depended on what walls existed (as well as upon my own psychic “vantage point”). There could have been other southeastern corners, with or without towers: Not all of the authors I consulted agreed upon the location of certain of Jerusalem’s fortifications (in the first century or any other), or when they had been built or destroyed.

6. My ruminations in notes 3 and 4 should indicate how difficult it can be for the conscious mind to interpret psychic data arising from other “layers” of itself. Jane and I haven’t been to Jerusalem, although we’d like to make the trip some day, but even if we did I don’t think it would be easy to identify the physical site of my “fourth Roman.” To do so would take much cautious study. For one thing, I’m sure that my imagery — and drawings — of Jerusalem’s fortifications would turn out to be much too meager in scale; surely those “real” works would be far more overpowering in height and mass. To insist upon interpreting my mental information in literal terms only might lead into a labyrinth of supposition, then.

For another thing, what was my nameless Roman self doing on that tower? I didn’t “see” the reasons and actions leading to his presence there, and I doubt if I ever will. In my reference works I read accounts describing how Pontius Pilate, the Procurator (or governor) of Judea from approximately A.D. 26 to A.D. 36, had organized hunts for members of the Zealots, the Jewish political-religious sect that had consistently rebelled against the rule of the Roman Empire. This is the correct general time period for my visions, I think, and I felt a surge of thrilling sensations as I learned about certain subversive Zealot activities. Then I “picked up” that my soldier-self was killed by his countrymen because he’d traitorously sought to warn Zealot leaders of a planned search of the lower city of Jerusalem by Roman troops. My thrills deepened considerably — and those feelings of rightness were what I settled for; I could carry my wonderings no further, nor did I want to.

As best I can interpret the objective information at hand, the physical locale of my subjective experience is a precarious one, since outside the eastern and southern boundaries of Jerusalem the terrain quickly drops away into valleys close and steep enough to protect the city from large-scale attack — with hardly enough room there for the “hordes” of Roman soldiers I saw on the “flat ground.” I cannot explain my terminology or choice of locations, except to say that I expressed just what I wanted to. I trust the elements of those perceptions, and my reactions to them, but their conscious understanding and integration remain beyond my abilities at this time. Obviously (as will be explained), I think it wise to ascribe as much of the episode’s validity to its symbolic meanings as to its physical ones.

For those who may wonder: I’ll close here by noting that historically the time period within which my impressions took place would embrace the reputed visits of Jesus Christ to Jerusalem during Pilate’s tenure, including Christ’s crucifixion around A.D. 30 — but that my experience per se had nothing to do with the Messiah.

13. Early in this appendix I wrote that I added these notes later, to give “ordinary background material” for my fourth Roman. So now, what do I make of the considerable similarities between my Jerusalem episode and Peter’s? Although his internal data reinforce mine to some extent, he can be no more specific about a physical location in the city for his visions than I can be for mine. (See Note 6.) I’ve also written about the conflicts involving authority that I believe my two Roman soldiers are expressing. Here I feel on more “solid ground” symbolically than physically. Just as I do, Peter rebels in his own peaceful ways against conventional authority, preferring to go his individual route in the arts, no matter how dubious his rewards may be.