1929 – 1984 · A portrait
A writer and her husband picked up a Ouija board while researching ESP, and a personality calling himself Seth began speaking through her. For twenty-one years she held trance sessions, the voice never fully explained.
While researching a book on ESP, she and her husband Robert Butts experimented with a Ouija board and began receiving coherent messages from a personality who soon named himself Seth. Within weeks she was speaking the words aloud instead of spelling them out.
Session by session, Robert Butts recorded in shorthand what she spoke as Seth: that consciousness creates its own reality, that the soul survives death across many simultaneous lives, and that no self is ever truly fixed.
The book built from those sessions appeared and became her best-known work, carrying Seth's core teaching to a far wider audience than the private sessions alone had ever reached.
Illness forced a long hiatus in the sessions before she resumed briefly near the end. She died that September, twenty-one years after the first messages came through the board.
Seth Speaks has stayed in print since 1972. Robert Butts organized and published further volumes from the sessions after her death. Seth Speaks is widely credited with shaping the channelling books that followed it.
Whether a distinct personality spoke through her, or her own mind produced the material unconsciously, cannot be settled from outside; she held it was Seth, not invention. A psychologist who reviewed the case wrote that fraud and unconscious production could not be told apart, and that no supernatural source needed to be assumed.