The Psychic Detective - Jane Roberts

Jane Roberts (1929-1984) was an American author, poet and psychic. She is best known as a trance medium who "channelled" an "entity" named Seth. The publication of the Seth texts established her as one of the preeminent figures in the world of paranormal phenomena. She was also an author of short stories, novels, children's literature, and metaphysical texts unrelated to Seth, including The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher, The Education of Oversoul Seven and Adventures in Consciousness. In late 1963, Jane Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, experimented with a Ouija board as part of Roberts' research for a book on ESP.

According to Roberts and Butts, on December 2, 1963 they began to receive coherent messages from a personality who eventually identified himself as Seth. Within weeks, Roberts began to hear the messages in her head and to dictate them, and the use of the Ouija 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 channelled messages from Seth. Butts served as stenographer, taking the messages down in homemade shorthand, although some sessions were recorded. These messages from Seth, consisting mostly of monologues on a wide variety of topics, are collectively known as the "Seth Material". The Material through 1969 was published in summary form in The Seth Material, which was written by Jane Roberts with substantial excerpts from Seth.

Beginning with the 511th session in January, 1970, Seth began to dictate his own books through Roberts. This series of "Seth books" eventually totalled nine volumes, although the last two books appear to be incomplete due to Roberts' illness. The list of titles includes Seth Speaks; The Nature of Personal Reality; The Nature of the Psyche, Its Human Expression; The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events; The Unknown Reality; and Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment. Robert Butts contributed notes and comments to all the Seth books, and thus he was a co-author on all of them.