“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane said I’d never told her about getting sick on purpose, although I thought I had. I asked her if she’d ever done that. “Sure,” she said. “I know that sometimes I made myself sick to get out of stuff like diagramming sentences and doing multiplication tables, in Catholic grade school. I was terrified of those things—I think it was in the fourth grade. I think I gave myself the mumps once, too.”

Jane added that her group of playmates hadn’t engaged in the same sort of games that mine had. “We might have played dead now and then—you know, lain down and closed our eyes, but that would be all.” In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. “I used to play being her all by myself,” she said. “I’d be brave and scornful, knowing I was going to be beheaded—that sort of thing.”