Introduction. This is my first entry into my new blog. My name is Tanika Palm, I am a medium, I do readings to my friends and relatives. I also record spirit messages from the spirits who come to visit me in order to share our interest in cleansing our chakras. But I am going ahead of myself. Lately I published a collection of spirit messages “Prisoners of Fame.” The book was published by Create Space and is available on the Amazon. com. it has been reviewed by a Kirkus anonymous reviewer and by the incredible English medium Robert Brown, known and loved both in Europe and USA for outstandingly accurate and intelligent readings and school of young mediums at his famous Bahama retreat.
In order to introduce my views on mediumship I will post here my latest article
Sorry, this post is long, the following posts will be short!
Both English and Russian versions of my book “Prisoners of Fame. Interviewing Spirits of Marlene Dietrich, W.A. Mozart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Elvis Presley…,” a collection of spirit messages, have provoked different reactions. The Kirkus Review critic wrote: “A quirky, engaging read filled with insightful interviews with the spirits of disenchanted celebrities.”
However, a reader of the Russian electronic library http//www.koob.ru , a Nobody, as he called himself, wrote: “Мра-ко-бе-си-е. И точка”.—“Ob-scu-ran-tism. Period.” Added was, -“Truly amazing is the cool of a person who suffers from hallucinations to this degree, how comes?”
I am not the first or the last medium whose work has been put down with deep conviction that any law abiding citizen has an obligation to murder a medium’s reputation! We know that this sense of obligation stems from a Biblical line ordering to stone the mediums to death. The Old Testament Book of Leviticus says:
“Men and women among you who act as mediums or psychics must be put to death by stoning. They are guilty of a capital offense.” (NLT) Leviticus 20:27
(This and following scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, © 1973, 1978, and 1984 by International Bible Society)
Mediums were made to share the fate of the lowest among the lowest at a time. Same death sentence was deliberated to practitioners of sodomy and bestiality. In the latter case, both the humans and participating animals were to be put to death by throwing stones.
Old and new is entwined in this ancient book in most peculiar way. People of pagan faiths who sacrificed their children to Moloch, the ancient God of Ammonites, were also deemed to die via stoning. (Gehenna, a valley by Jerusalem, where apostate Israelites and followers of various Baalim and Canaanite gods, including Moloch, sacrificed their children by fire, was mentioned in 2 Chr. 28:3, 33:6; Jer. 7:31, 19:2–6.
The rising monotheist religion dismissed the human sacrifices, the common ritual of pagan societies all over the world, the European pagan countries included. We all remember the story of Abraham. God interfered when Abraham was ready to land his knife into his son Isaac’s heart. God saved Isaac’s life and the law “Thou shalt not kill” entered the Ten Commandments. Probably, it was the first law forbidding to kill a slave. It meant that the value of slave’s life was equalized with the value of his master’s life. The ban of killing a slave was emphasized separately in Exodus 21:12. As a matter of fact, this ground breaking ban was at the heart of Monotheist religious revolution, the gift of Jews to humanity.
At the same time, next to its greatest achievement, the ban on murdering human being, we find the following lines:
“If a man lies with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness, he hath discovered her, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood, both of them shall be cut off from his people. (Leviticus 20, 2-18)
Thomas Cahill, the author of “The Gifts of the Jews. How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels” says:
“Though the Bible is full of literature’s two great themes, love and death, it is also full of tedious ritual prescriptions and interminable battles. More than anything, because the Bible is the product of so many hands over so many ages, it is full of confusion for the modern reader who attempts to decode what it might be about.” Cited by “The Gifts of the Jews: Desert Nomads Changed the World with the Word” by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times on the web: Books of the Times, on March 16, 1998
Probably, the fanaticism of the old laws echoes the spirit of the historic environment where the transition from old to new took place. The new religion was taking off in the polytheist slaveholding society. Deprived from all rights slave could be sold, tortured, humiliated or murdered by his owner without any formal liability but the owner’s private consciousness. Of course, oftentimes the mindfulness did not bother slave holders, and the protest — destructive slave rebellions became part of daily life at that period in human history. Despite severe punishments, the slave rebels search for justice lasted eons.
800 years before Exodus, in faraway XIV century BC, the Egypt pharaoh Akhenaten made the One God religion the Egypt’s official religion. However, after his death the polytheism was restored and fate of supporters of Monotheism is unknown. Were they buried alive in pyramids as rebels and political opponents? The Egyptian nobility was not ready to accept monotheism, because it carried the potential of unheard humiliation. It equalized if not people than their souls: in the eyes of Almighty both master and slave became “God’s children” and automatically – “brothers and sisters”! To put it bluntly, the highborn were not ready to become slaves’ “brothers and sisters.”
However, the idea of One God, the Almighty ruler of all people, continued to glow under the ashes attracting followers amidst enslaved people. Wikipedia articles about Judaism mention the ancient period of Monopatria, when One God, the stern and awe-inspiring, jealous and autocratic Heavenly Father was gaining absolute authority. His laws, commandments and will were ruling life of an enslaved nation before Moses accepted the enormous task of turning ONE GOD into the ONLY God of the Jews. It asked for isolation of enslaved Jews from their Egyptian pagan surrounding for 40 year-long Exodus, the search of The Promised Land, where the faith in One God would become the official religion of a free nation! In other words, Jews became “CHOSEN PEOPLE” by being elected to develop Monotheism, the tool for moving from slave holding society to the next step of development – the feudal society!
Of course, this is a simplified, and probably, not a scientific description of the growth of the spiritual consciousness, but it helps to understand why, the wrath of founder fathers’ of Judaism was focusing on mediums and spirit communication. In surrounding pagan world, the popularity of spirits counseling was unparalleled: it served the people in advanced slaveholding societies on daily bases.
Historians say that the famous Oracle at Delphi (Python Temple of Apollo at Delphi) was the source of spirituality of entire Ancient Greek culture. The spirit talk was facilitated by professional mediums who inhaled volcanic vapors in order to see and hear spirits more clearly. The Mount Vesuvius’ vapor near Napoli supported professional mediums, like Sibyl of Cumae, prophetess, described by Homer (Book 11, “Kingdom of the Dead), and mediums in Baia’s Antrum of Initiation, mentioned by historian Ephorus Cyme 400-330 BC. He wrote “They live in underground houses, and it is through tunnels that they visit one another, back and forth, and also admit strangers to the oracle, which is situated far beneath the ground.”
In the 60s of the past century, Robert F. Paget, the author and the leader of excavations, found the lost entrance into the Antrum of Initiation or Great Antrum, the cavity of an underground structure in volcanic rock, the source of miraculous perception altering vapor, the temple of spirit communication in Baia, the ancient Roman resort near Napoli.
Robert F. Paget stressed the influence of both centers of spirit communication on European culture. The Wikipedia article “Virgil’s Cumaean Sybil” comments on Robert F. Paget’s corresponding notes:
“In the Aeneid, in the great Roman Epic by Virgil, there is a description of a journey to the Underworld that may or may not have a bearing on an understanding of the Antrum of Initiation. In Book IV, Aeneas, Virgil’s hero, led by the Sybil, or a Prophetess of Cumae, tours at the Land of the Dead. This Aeneid’s episode was the inspiration for the similar tour that Dante Alighieri took, with Virgil as his guide, in his Inferno.”
The Cumaean Sibyl is featured in the works of Virgil The Eclogues, The Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petronius The Satiricon, and others. And, of course, the mysteries echo of Baia “dungeon”, as some authors called this underground “cavity”, did not end here. Over centuries, the mystery of communion with spirits has touched and inspired researchers, writers, poets and artists alike long after Baia “dungeon” stopped functioning as a spirit communication center in the Catholic Italy.
It seems that through centuries after centuries critics of Spiritualism are blindly guided by the letter of Leviticus Laws forgetting the reason why mediums were condemned by reformists of the heavenly authority. There was only one serious reason: In pagan worlds the mediums’ popularity was so profound that in order to conquer it, the death penalty was declared for practicing the spirit talk for strengthening the authority of the ONE and the ONLY GOD of ancient Monopatria.
For reckoning the time when Monotheism emerged from the luxurious Egyptian society with its totalitarian cruelty, richness and sexual liberties, it may help to compare it with Lenin’s social “experiment.” The legend has it that Lenin considered Russia because of disastrous participating in WWI, returning home of armies of armed soldiers, civil unrests of hungry mob in Petersburg — the ideal country for staging a social experiment! And so the Russian revolution was born. November 7th 1917 Lenin, the leader of Bolsheviks, took over the power in that disintegrating country promising bring down paradise from heavens to earth, and land to peasants, now armed soldiers back from WWI front lines.
However, for some irrational reasons, these promises evoked, as in the past, the need to isolate the lucky ones from the rest of the world. For the starters, the churches were closed and turned into various warehouses; Russian nobility was erased from the face of the earth; the “iron curtain” and militant border with packs of trained Alsatians materialized out of the blue; ruble became nonconvertible; travel abroad was abolished, and ownership of no-matter-how-small amount of the international currency became a CRIME against the homeland worth severe punishment, a lengthy imprisonment. Trains after trains after trains were running across the Russian plains toward Siberian GULAGS, filling “re-educational” prison camps with millions of victims of Lenin’s experiment. The invisible energy clouds of unbearable pain and suffering, moral crises, humiliation, and hunger are still hanging over Russia delaying its healing and restoration.
In the ancient past, Jewish people recognized the authority of invisible heavenly powers abolishing human sacrifice and condemning killing humans in general. However, the ban of esoteric practices started to create problems for the authors of the Old Testament right from the start. Since times immemorial, any religion, as a go-between heaven and earth, gods and humans, was based on the spirit communication. Anthropologists believe that the cave drawings depict “reports” of shaman-type leaders’ about their out-of-body travels; their carved in stones stories served as ritualistic “icons” in initiation ceremonies. Prophets, clairvoyants, mediums, children, teenagers, and mere mortals have received help and seen light beings, angels, heard their voices, asked questions and received understood or misunderstood answers since times immemorial. Classical samples of spirit communication fill Bible from the first page to the last. An angel walked in front of Moses when he started the Exodus from Egypt; God spoke to Moses directly: “You shall have no other gods before me!” Exodus 20:3. In the New Testament, Jesus talked with spirits of Moses and Elijah in “Transfiguration,” Matthew 17: 3-13.
The bans of spiritual practices has led to the emergence of forbidden religions and secret societies all over the world in which esoteric practices of prophecy, channeling, magic, and alternative healing have been preserved and developed. To be more precise, if the secret societies refined the lives of people who belonged to the upper class, then the need in esotericism of the poor was satisfied by the lowest amidst lower – Gypsies and shaman-type “wise women” or “wise men” in every village in the world.
The ancient world of Jews was no different. Despite the ban, all Biblical Prophets, including Moses and Jesus (officially John the Baptist and Jesus are not seen as prophets, but I believe, in this article The Savior can be called Prophet as well) and every prophet in between, practiced forbidden spirit communication intensely, oftentimes in its most extreme forms. The prophets were protected from the stern laws by declaration that messages were given by the only existing authority – ONE GOD. Today, it may cause difficulties to understand some Biblical messages.
Yelena Blavatsky points to the following example of a Lord given message:
“Make them linen undergarments as a covering for the body reaching from the waist to the thighs.” (Exodus, 28: 42). She commented, “God the flax spinner and tailor?”
The historians of Judaism have mentioned that the adherence to the letter of the law aiming to isolate Jews from Gentiles started divide Jews: ones who were law abiding, and the others who found laws to be too linear, rigid and strict. In the name of God, prophet Ezekiel defends the sinners, “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”(Ezekiel 18:23)
The death of the John the Baptist is wrapped into romantic flair. According to this popular story, John was beheaded at the request of the Jewish Queen Herodias and her daughter Salome, who charmed the king with her dance. The king pronounced, “Ask what you want?” And the ladies expressed their wish to have John’s head on a platter. Does a young and beautiful woman really need the head of a loud and hot man on a bloody platter? In other words, most likely, the story how John the Baptist died masks the eternal conflict between the need for bigger freedom, truth and the crowd’s need for stability; prophets offered bigger freedom and priesthood granted stability! Death of John and Jesus reflected the same everlasting conflict of duality: searching for bigger freedom versus safeguarding stability?!
Something made me, a complete dilettante in history of religion, to reread the last verses of “Exodus,” what did happen to Moses upon his arrival to the Promised Land. And there it was what I was looking for! An anonymous Bible scribe put it there for us to decipher! The difference of prophets and priesthood was outlined at the outset. Prophet Moses started and endured Exodus, but it was priest Aron, Moses’ “brother”, who arrived at the Promised Land! It is something to think about, isn’t it? The coda of the book of Exodus 40: 13-35 reads:
13 And thou shalt put upon Aaron the holy garments, and anoint him, and sanctify him, that he would be a priest to Me.
15 And thou shalt anoint them that they serve me as priests and their anointing to them for an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations. (…)
34 Then a cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
35 And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
Since what time Prophet Moses was forbidden to speak to God? Nevertheless, in the sentence, “And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting” the Moses’ name appears the last time in the Exodus’ book. This was how Moses left the scenery of Exodus!
The Book Exodus is followed by The Book of Leviticus. It opens with the following short story: “And the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying,
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, if any man of you bring an offering unto the Lord, if one of the cattle, bring your offering of the cattle and sheep.”
Why Moses did not enter the tabernacle and receives his cattle sorting order standing at the door? The entire scene sounds like a prelude to millenniums long hidden schism between the free thinkers and the law-guarding priesthood?
Regrettably, in Europe, the same conflict would ignite the Holy Inquisition’s bonfires in their fight for stability of Catholic Church. Time to time, the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) by Danish genius Carl Theodor Dreyer can be seen on TMC – Turner Movie Classic channel. The film was staged from the transcript of Joan’s trial. Watch the faces of the priests who judge Joan! Dreyer made the eternal conflict between the Freedom Seeker and the collective power of mediocrity the center point of his movie. On its home turf, the crowd’s need for stability wins always, and Joan was burned at the stake.
Regrettably, both complexity of the subtle worlds and lack of proper knowledge have birthed many superstitions, negative speculations and criticism over the time. How to determine who or what speaks through a medium, a discarnate soul, or medium’s determination to squeeze some bucks out of grief? Do mediums convey messages from their subconscious mind or from spirits? Who is talking to a medium, a fallen angel, a mischievous spirit, or a Light Being? Are all so called Light Beings coming from the Divine Light? Is a given spirit a pure one, or an impure one? Does this particular spirit information come from clean or unclean channel? None of these questions can be answered by a so called “normal human being” with closed clear seeing-hearing-sensing channels.
As any common medium, I have met different spirits. The first ones were the spirits of the deceased relatives. Later came spirits of strangers — actors, writers, journalists and musicians whose messages were included into my book “Prisoners of Fame”*. Also, some random or wondering spirits have visited me. I remember a man, who took the liberty to leave the hospital without a permission hoping to be back before doctor’s morning visit. While crossing the street in rush, he did not notice a fast car… The next moment, instead of a familiar street in Tallinn, Estonia, he found himself wondering in the astral world. He said he was a chorister of the popular Estonian Male Choir, intensively booked and always on concert tours. Speaking in Estonian, he asked for help to be guided back home, “I miss them, I want to go home to my wife and children!” He was desperate and scared and couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that he was dead. I met also deceiving spirits, pretenders. After a short but memorable visitation of Biblical Mary of Magdala with her unparalleled spirit message how Christianity emerged in Post-Jesus’ world, a number of deceiving and vulgar pretending spirits followed. Among them, one pretended to be no more, no less than God’s Mother, asking modestly not to kneel in front of her, and not to kiss her hands and feet. Her fluent Russian language had slight Armenian accent. She listed a number of flaws in me that she was eager to correct…
One may ask how I, the medium, could tell, who was real and who was a pretender? In given case all I could count on was the feeling of what feels right and what feels suspicious. The genuine high rank spirits don’t come to judge or offend you. They come to tell you something special, or help you.
Amidst the spirits of so called “average” people (who can tell who is average, and who is not?) — there are many who seek the chance to serve and grow, and there are flocks of spirits who enjoy their afterlife free from money problems. And there are also individuals tortured by dependency on alcohol, overeating, cigarettes and narcotics. Instead of looking at spirit communication down from above, it would be way more useful to collect from the spirits the first hand knowledge about the devastating consequences of carrying around clogged spirit channels and chakras, tons of thought forms of unreleased pain and guilt. I learned this, receiving spirit messages from celebrities who shared openly and honestly what was happening to them in afterlife. These messages are included into “Prisoners of Fame”, my book published in Create Space in 2013 in both languages, English and Russian.
The presumptuous attitude toward spirit communication has to change toward cooperation of mediums with representatives of many branches of medical science aiming to diminish pain and suffering on earth, and consequently, in heaven. In terms of savings, I guess, we are talking here about savings on medical bills in billions, if not trillions of dollars, because most deceases come from invisible to human eyes clogged energy channels. Lack of money, bad luck comes from the same – deficiency of cosmic energy that is not able to pass through the clogged energy channels and clogged grounding. However, before mediums can help to heal people, people have to heal their attitude toward spirits and learn more about the laws of subtle worlds, in general not known by people at all. Too often people pay mediums only for spirit messages which confirm what they want to hear, and reject the serious and useful messages. Sometimes it goes for mediums themselves.
On September 10th, 2001, the eve of “9/11,” a brief spirit message from Cary Grant spoke about the “bombings tomorrow morning in New York.” I had my doubts, did I got it right? Ironically, these are the people who fail to listen what they were told to. In most cases, people are not prepared to accept true messages. We are used to clinging to routine perception of reality “as we like it to be” or “as it was used to be” and predictions regarding instantaneous changes caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, explosions, bombings, or by traveling disasters seem erroneous. And still judging the spirit messages and mediums by Leviticus recipe does not help either.
Maybe one more little thing is on the way of difficulties in perception of spirit communication phenomenon. I mean, too uncertain and bleak “beginning” of so called “modern Spiritualism” in a field where, as a matter of fact, there are no “beginnings”, because they are buried in the vastness of the prehistoric period of humanity. Most articles about spirit communication repeat telling us that the whole thing was started by Fox sisters in 1848 near New York, in Hydeswille.
On the very first page of History of Spiritualism its author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote:
“Spiritualists were in the habit of taking March 31, 1848, as the start of all psychic things, because their own movement dates from that day. There was, however, been no time in the recorded history of the world when we do not find traces of preternatural interference and a tardy recognition of them from humanity.” Doyle continues: “The spirit influx of recent years was heralded by a number of incidents which might well be traced to the Middle Aged or beyond them. Some terms must be fixed for the commencement of the narrative, and perhaps no better one can be found than the story of the great Swedish seer Emanuel Swedenborg, who has some claim to be the father of our new knowledge of supernal matters.”
The Fox Sisters, definitely lovely mediums, lived on the land consecrated by Indian shamans long before New York was built, and, sure, these shamans talked to the spirits of their ancestors on daily bases. Long dead, they came to help the new generation of “white men’s” mediums in 19th and 20th centuries. They announced their specific names, like “White Feather” or “Red Bull” or “Black Elk” and did not claim recognition or awards, acting only as mediums’ guides. Their help was altruistic, they came to pass on their knowledge to the next generation of mediums and remind that the true age of spirit communication equals the age of humanity, because we are wired to know about the life of our immortal soul in the afterlife. The purpose of spirit communication is not limited to casting looks into future, rather speed up the growth of human consciousness and diminish suffering on earth and in afterlife.
1. The Holy Bible. New International Version, Colorado Springs, CO 80962, International Bible Society, 1984
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism
3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_history
4.Doyle, Arthur Conan The History of Spiritualism Volume One & Two, New York Arno Press, 1975
5. Broad, William J. The Oracle. The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi, New York, The Penguin Press, 2006
6. Temple, Robert Oracles of the Dead. Ancient Techniques for Predicting the Future Rochester, Vermont , Destiny Books, 2005
7. Smoley, Richard Forbidden Faith, The Gnostic Legacy From the Gospel to the Da Vinci Code, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006
Palm, Tanika “Prisoners of Fame. Interviewing Spirits of Marlene Dietrich, W.A. Mozart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Elvis Presley… Los Angeles, Create Space, Amazon Division, July, 2013
http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Fame-Interview-Dietrich-Presley/dp/149042766X/
Пальм, Таника Узники славы. Из послесмертия говорят Марлен Дитрих, Николай Гогол, Владимир Высоцкий, Элвис Пресли… ЛосАнджелес, Create Space, Amazon Division, Июль, 2014
http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Fame-Dietrich-Vladimir-Vysotsky/dp/0976453886
tanikablog 
