Dorothy Jane Roberts (May 8, 1929 – September 5, 1984) was an American author and poet, who claimed to be psychic and a spirit medium channeling a personality who called himself "Seth." Her publication of the Seth texts, known as the Seth Material, established her as one of the preeminent figures in the world of paranormal phenomena.
Early life and career Roberts was born in Albany, New York, and grew up in nearby Saratoga Springs, New York. Her parents, Delmer Hubbell Roberts and Marie Burdo, divorced when she was two years old. With her only child, the young Marie then returned to her own parents, and the home that the family had rented for a number of years: half of a double dwelling in a poor neighborhood. Marie had begun experiencing the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis by 1932 but worked as much as possible. Eventually, Roberts' grandfather, Joseph Burdo, with whom she shared a deep mystical identification, was unable to support two extra people, and the family had to rely upon public assistance. Roberts' grandmother was killed in an automobile accident in 1936.
The next year, her grandfather moved out of the house. By then Marie was partially incapacitated, and the Welfare Department began to furnish mother and daughter with occasional and often unreliable domestic help.The 'Unknown' Reality', Vol. 1, by Jane Roberts (1977), pg. 40. When Marie became a bedridden invalid, it was Jane's responsibility to take care of her. This included cooking, cleaning, bringing her the bedpan, and getting up in the middle of the night to refuel the stove. Her embittered mother would tell Jane she was going to turn on the gas jets in the middle of the night and kill them both. When her mother attempted suicide for about the fifth time, she took sleeping pills and was in the hospital. Jane wrote that she went to the welfare worker and said, 'I can't take it anymore. I've just got to leave.'" Over and over Marie told Jane she was no good, that the daughter's birth had caused the mother's illness, and that she was disowned and considered no longer her daughter.
Well before she was 10 years old Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis. By her early teens, she had an overactive thyroid gland. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses (which she seldom wore). For most of 1940 and half of 1941, Jane was in a strictly-run Catholic orphanage in Troy, New York while her mother was hospitalized in another city for treatment of her arthritis. Priests came to the house regularly and support was offered to the fatherless family. Jane's initial bonding to the cultural beliefs of religion was very strong to make up for the lack of a loving, nurturing family. For a time she was left between belief systems.
In the summer of 1945, when she was 16 years old, Jane began working at a variety store. It was her first job. That fall she continued on the job after school hours and on an occasional Saturday. After attending public schools she went to Skidmore College from 1947 to 1950 on a poetry scholarship. Roberts' grandfather died when she was age 19. It was a time of severe shock for her. She began to substitute scientific world view for religious belief.The 'Unknown' Reality, Vol. 1, by Jane Roberts (1977), pg. 30. Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, by Jane Roberts (1986), pp. 75–77. Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 2, by Jane Roberts (1986), pp. 371, 421, 441, 442, 450, 452–53.
At that time Jane was dating Walt Zeh, a long-time Saratoga Springs friend. Together they went to the west coast by motorcycle to see Jane's father who had also come from a broken home. Jane then married Walt and continued to write while taking a variety of other jobs, including society editor for the Saratoga newspaper, and as a supervisor in a radio factory. Walt and Jane lived together for three years. It was then in February 1954 while "cutting up, dancing, and raisin' hell at a party," that Jane first met the former commercial artist Robert Fabian Butts, Jr. The fourth time they met at another party and Jane "just looked at him and said, 'Look, I'm leaving Walt, and I'm going to live by myself or I'm going to live with you, so just let me know.'"Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness, by Jane Roberts (1986), pg. 16. Eventually the two left town together and Jane filed for divorce. Jane and Rob married on December 27, 1954, at the home of his parents in Sayre, Pennsylvania.Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 2, by Jane Roberts (1986), pg. 524.
Roberts wrote in a variety of genres: poetry, short stories, children's literature, nonfiction, science fiction and fantasy, and novels. She was the only woman invited to the first science-fiction writer's conference in 1956 in Milford, Pennsylvania.
The couple moved to Elmira, New York, in 1960, to find steady part-time work – Rob in the local greeting card company, Jane in an art gallery. Now in her 30s, she and her husband began to record what she said were messages from a personality named "Seth," and she wrote several books about the experience.
Seth Material
On a September evening in 1963, Roberts sat down at her table to work on poetry; Butts was in his back-room studio, painting. "It was very domestic, very normal, very unpsychedelic," she would later remember. And then "Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force ... It was as if the physical world were really tissue-paper-thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound." When she "came to," Roberts found herself scrawling the title of this batch of notes: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.
Before this, though her fiction typically dealt with such themes as clairvoyance and reincarnation, intellectually neither she nor Butts believed in extrasensory abilities. Yet soon after this episode, Roberts suddenly began recalling her dreams, including two that were precognitive. Their curiosity piqued, the couple decided to investigate further, and she managed to land a contract with a New York publisher for a do-it-yourself book on extra-sensory perception.
In late 1963, Roberts and Butts started experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Roberts' research for the book.ESP Power, by Jane Roberts (2000) (introductory essay by Lynda Dahl). 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. The first seven sessions were entirely with the Ouija board. The three-hour session on the evening of January 2, 1964, was the first where she began to dictate the messages instead of using the Ouija board. For a while, she still opened her sessions with the board, but finally abandoned it after the 27th session on Feb. 19, 1964.Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness, by Jane Roberts (1986), pp. 68, 166.
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."Conversations With Seth, Book 2: 25th Anniversary Edition, by Susan M. Watkins (2006). The 26th session on Feb. 18, 1964, was the first held in the presence of another person—a friend.Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness, by Jane Roberts (1986), pg. 157.
On January 17, 1964, Roberts channeled an allegedly recently deceased woman who told Butts that his and his wife's work with Seth was a life-time project, that they would publish his manuscripts, and help spread his ideas.Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness, by Jane Roberts (1986), pp. 105–106. At the 27th session Seth also told the couple how to rearrange the furniture in their apartment which would better suit their energies. Despite feelings of disbelief toward both messages, the couple somewhat reluctantly agreed. Two days afterward they heard from a psychologist interested in reincarnation to whom they had written three weeks earlier with some session copies enclosed. The psychologist told them that the very fluency of the material suggested that it might come from Roberts' subconscious, though it was impossible to tell. He also cautioned that in some circumstances, amateur mediumship could lead to mental problems.
The letter upset her but helped her deal with her doubts. She felt there were no "alarming changes" in her personality. "I was doing twice the creative work I had done earlier. I was satisfied with the quality of the Seth Material; it was far superior to anything I could do on my own. If nothing else, I thought the sessions presented a way of making deeply unconscious knowledge available on a consistent basis."Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness, by Jane Roberts (1986), pp. 170–171. "Because we were so innocent about psychic literature, we weren't hampered by superstitious fears about such [psychic] phenomena. I didn't believe in gods or demons, so I didn't fear them. I wanted to learn. Rob and I had discovered a whole new world together, and we were going to explore it."
Roberts assumed Seth was a subconscious fantasy, personified because she did not believe in spirits or life after death. She monitored her personality characteristics and went to a psychologist. But she felt that "Seth seemed far more mature and well-balanced than the psychologist, so finally I stopped worrying. This is not to say the experience did not cause certain strains and stresses that could accompany any worthwhile venture in an entirely new field."Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness, by Jane Roberts (1986), p. 84.
Roberts also purportedly channeled the world views of several other people, including the philosopher William James,Stanley Fisher and John Edminster, "William James.... Ghostwriter?", FATE #350, pp. 61–66 (1979) Rembrandt, and the Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, through a process she described as using a typewriter to write "automatically."Session 718, The Unknown Reality, Vol. 2, by Jane Roberts (1979).
For 21 years until Roberts' death in 1984 (with a one-year hiatus due to her final illness), Roberts held more than 1500 regular or private "ESP class" trance sessions in which she spoke on behalf of Seth.Roger Woolger, Other Lives, Other Selves: A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives, (1988). Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, by Jane Roberts (1986). Butts served as the stenographer, taking the messages down in shorthand he had made up, having others on occasion make recording of some sessions.Dreams, 'Evolution,' and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 2, by Jane Roberts (1986), pg. 491. 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.