“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.

“What would a Roman soldier be doing up there?, I wondered. For below, on the flat ground outside the wall, were the hordes⁴ of the Roman army. I don’t know whether they were preparing for an attack, or had some other reason to be assembled there. I saw only a forest of helmets and spears pointing upward, with light glinting dully on metal here and there. I write ‘saw,’ yet it would be just as accurate to note that I sensed these figures. They were turned toward the soldier on the tower.

“Somehow, without being able to see them, I knew that stone or clay steps rose up the back of the tower, clear to the top where the soldier posed. He didn’t move. Try as I would, I couldn’t make his image any clearer or closer, or induce it to change in any other manner. What I did perceive was remarkably steady and lasted for several minutes, at least. I can still summon it to my mind’s eye when I want to. It came to me that the soldier was 43 years old and had two male children — where they were, I didn’t know. Like an echo in the background lingered a woman, but I couldn’t get anything about her.

“Now the scene changed, as one might change a slide in a projector. In another little drama, motionless like the first one, I saw my Roman soldier suspended in the act of falling from the tower. He had, in truth, been thrown off it, and I believe that he was either dead or mortally wounded from stab wounds. He had a bandage wrapped around the biceps of his left arm. Now I knew that a ‘task force’ of other Roman soldiers had carried out this assault, reaching ‘me’ by climbing the steps already described. I saw no sign of others on the tower, though. I kept this second image in mind for some time before allowing myself to realize that the victim fell amid a group of his fellows. One of them, I believe, ran a spear into the body.

So you, Joseph, were Nebene, and the black woman, and the Roman soldier,³ and yet you were none of those. [...]