Jane Roberts - Seth Material

Seth Material

In late 1963, Roberts and Butts, living in the Elmira, New York area, 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 eventually 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 she eventually abandoned the board.

Roberts described the process of writing the Seth books as entering a trance state. She said Seth would assume control of her body and speak through her, while her husband wrote down the words she spoke. They referred to such episodes as "readings" or "sessions".

Roberts also purportedly channeled the world views of several other people, including the philosopher William James and the Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, through a process she described as using a typewriter to write "automatically."

For 21 years until Roberts' death in 1984 (with a one-year hiatus due to her final illness), Roberts held regular trance sessions in which she spoke on behalf of Seth. Butts served as stenographer, taking the messages down in home-made shorthand, and recording some sessions. The messages from Seth channeled through Roberts consisted mostly of monologues on a wide variety of topics. They were published by Prentice-Hall under the collective title Seth Material.

Over the years, hundreds of people witnessed Seth speaking. Some went to the ESP classes Roberts held (Tuesday and some Thursday nights, 1967-1975) for an evening, others attended for longer periods. Outside of the class structure, Roberts gave many personal Seth sessions to various individuals who had written her, asking for help. She never charged for those sessions; however, at some point she did charge $2.50 to $3.50 per ESP class of 5 to 40 people. When the books began to sell in sufficient numbers, she dropped that fee. Book sessions were almost always private, held on Monday and Wednesday evenings without witnesses from 1967 through 1982.

The material through 1969 was published in summary form in The Seth Material, written by Roberts from the output of the channeling sessions. Beginning in January 1970, Roberts wrote books which she described as dictated by Seth. Roberts claimed no authorship of these books beyond her role as medium. This series of "Seth books" totaled ten volumes. The last two books appear to be incomplete due to Roberts' illness. Butts contributed extensive footnotes, appendices, and other comments to all the Seth books, and thus was a co-author on all of them. These additions describe what was going on in Roberts' and his life at the time of the various sessions, annotated some of Seth's comments in light of contemporary beliefs and materials that Roberts and Butts were reading, described excerpts from some fan mail and letters from professionals commenting on Seth's material about their fields, and especially later, provided insight as to the many steps of production of multiple books with the publisher. Some of Roberts' earlier and later poetry was occasionally included to show how she had touched upon some of Seth's concepts. Roberts also wrote The Oversoul Seven trilogy to explore via fiction some of Seth's teachings on the concepts of reincarnation and oversouls.

According to Roberts, Seth described himself as an "energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality", who was independent of Roberts' subconscious. Roberts initially expressed skepticism as to Seth's origins, wondering if he was a part of her own personality. As Seth, Roberts at times appeared stern, jovial or professorial. "He" frequently assumed a distinct, although not identifiable, accent. 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. Later books continued to develop but did not contradict the material introduced in earlier works. Some Practice Elements were even given so that the readers could see how a few of the concepts could be practically experienced.

A few contemporary world events were commented upon by Seth, such as the Jonestown Guyana deaths and the Three Mile Island accident.

Seth also provided an alternative creation myth to that of either the Big Bang or Intelligent Design.

Roberts' father died in November of 1971 at the age of 68; her mother died six months later at the same age. In early 1982 Roberts spent a month in the hospital for severely underactive thyroid gland, protruding eyes and double vision, an almost total hearing loss, a slight anemia, budding bedsores -- and a hospital-caused staph infection She recovered to an extent, but died two and a half years later in 1984, having been bedridden with severe arthritis -- like her mother -- for the final year and a half of her life. (Butts believed for some 15 years that in Roberts' case, at least, the young girl's psychological conditioning was far more important -- far more damaging, in those terms -- than any physical tendency to inherit the disease.) After Roberts’ death, lovingly recorded in The Way Toward Health (1997), Butts continued his work as a guardian of the Seth texts and continued to supervise the publication of some of the remaining material, including The Early Sessions, and making sure that all of the recordings, manuscripts, notes and drawings related to the extraordinary encounters with Seth would be given to the Yale Library. Butts remarried, and his second wife, Laurel, supported his work during the more than twenty years of their marriage. Butts died in May of 2008, but the vitality of the teachings he helped to bring to the world continues. A number of groups have compiled anthologies of quotes from Seth, summarized sections of his teachings, issued copies of Seth sessions on audio tape, and further relayed the material via classes and conventions.