Seth Material - History

History

In late 1963, Jane Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, experimented with a Ouija board as part of Roberts' research for a book on extra-sensory perception. According to Roberts and Butts, on December 2, 1963, they began to receive coherent messages from a male personality who later identified himself as Seth. Soon after, Roberts reported that she was hearing the messages in her head. She began to dictate the messages instead of using the Ouija board, and the board was eventually abandoned. For 21 years until Roberts' death in 1984 (with a one-year hiatus due to her final illness), Roberts held regular sessions in which she went into a trance and purportedly spoke on behalf of Seth.

According to Roberts, the Seth personality described himself as an "energy personality essence no longer focused in physical matter" who was independent of Roberts' subconscious, although Roberts herself expressed skepticism as to Seth's origins, frequently referring to Seth's statements as "theories". The Seth personality said that he had completed his earthly reincarnations and was speaking from an adjacent plane of existence (or "system of reality" or "universe", all terms which the Seth personality used). The Seth personality described himself as a "teacher", and said: "this material has been given by himself and others in other times and places, but that it is given again, in new ways, for each succeeding generation through the centuries."

Unlike the psychic Edgar Cayce, whose syntax when speaking in trance was antiquated and convoluted, Roberts' syntax and sentence structures were modern and clear when speaking as Seth. Roberts often sat in a rocking chair during sessions, and she would occasionally smoke cigarettes and sip beer or wine. Afterwards, she would usually not remember the contents of the session, and she would have to read the transcript or be told what Seth had said.