Jane Roberts And Seth

A young woman sits in a rocking chair, holding court. She sprawls the way a man would, taking up space she feels entitled to. She is raw and rangy with a great deal of dark hair in a style that is less page boy and more renaissance princeling. She looks like a young Rolling Stone- more specifically like the young Bill Wyman. When she speaks the tone is deep, the intonation rythmic- at first you think she's chanting- and the accent is seriously odd- like comedy Italian- with drawled "a"s at the end of words that don't require them.

This is Jane Roberts, caught on smoky 70s video, channeling Seth.

Seth is your kindly, rascally uncle from the other side- a 17th century Danish spice merchant from a good ways up the angelic tree. You'd think from the performance in the smoky video that his recorded words would read as bombastic and semi-literate but- shorn of the eccentricities of delivery and all the redundant vowels- they're a model of clarity and organisation. The mystical has never seemed so clear-cut. Consciousness is everything, death, time and space are illusions, we live in a multiverse and choose our own lives. Everything our civilisation doesn't care to have said (except feebly, by feeble clerics) he says vigorously and as if there were never any doubt about it.

Ah, but on whose authority?

Comes down to who you trust, doesn't it, who you feel drawn to. Do you trust, say, Professor Richard Dawkins- patrician, scientist chappie- lots of letters behind his name- good with a microscope and a dab hand at a put-down- or do you trust the damaged young person with the piratical attitude who burned through her life and was out the far side at 54- her and her uncle Seth?

No contest as far as I'm concerned...