“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

“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.

(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.

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.