The invention of European bee shamanism

A British shamanic school is accused of 'conspiracy to defraud spiritually seeking persons for their own financial benefit'

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Shamanism is the fastest-growing religion in the UK.  There is no officially organized shamanic hierarchy, creed or dogma, simply a set of practices to go into altered states and connect to the spirits of nature – this DIY aspect is part of the reason for its popularity in the age of the freelance spiritual influencer.

Nonetheless, there are shamans you can pay for shamanic healings or readings, and there are centres where you can pay to learn  ‘shamanic practitioner training’.  Some wannabe-shamans might go to Peru, Africa or Mongolia to seek apprenticeship in indigenous traditions, but that raises the question of whether it’s appropriate or even possible for a westerner to be truly initiated into non-western traditions.  Meanwhile, a handful of western schools have, over the last 30 years, offered shamanic training. One of the leading shamanic schools in the UK is the Sacred Trust.

The Sacred Trust is run by a British occultist and neo-shaman called Simon Buxton. In the 1990s, he owned a Mind Body Spirit bookstore in Bath called Arcania, where he invited teachers for talks and magical workings. Then in 2001 he launched his own school and began to offer courses.

At the beginning, the main offering of the Sacred Trust was a one-year course in ‘core shamanic practitioner training’ - a course developed by American neo-shaman Michael Harner in the 1980s. But Buxton also developed his own courses, including ‘Sacred Burials’ , ‘The Spirit of the Drum’ and a five-day immersion in darkness called Darkness Visible, which he co-created with a fellow British neo-shaman called Ross Heaven.

Jez Hughes, a well-known British shaman, trained at the Sacred Trust in 2002. He says: ‘It’s one of the oldest British shamanic schools and has trained a lot of people. Simon is a very compelling teacher.’

The Shamanic Way of the Bee

In 2004, Buxton published his first solo-written book, The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters.  The book was published by Inner Traditions (and distributed by Simon & Schuster in the US), and the blurb read:

Bee shamanism may be the most ancient and enigmatic branch of shamanism, and it is found throughout the world wherever the honeybee exists. In this authoritative ethnography and spiritual memoir, Simon Buxton--an elder of the Path of Pollen-- reveals the secret wisdom of this age-old tradition, until now known only to initiates.

Buxton claimed he had undergone a 13-year initiation into the ancient European tradition of bee shamanism thanks to a Welsh bee shaman whom he called Bridge, or Bid Ben Bid Bont, which supposedly translates from the archaic Welsh as ‘he who would lead, be also a bridge’. 

Bridge supposedly took on Buxton as his shamanic apprentice, calling him Twig, and then initiated him through a long series of intense rituals, including being  stung by a bee, buried alive, hunting a deer and killing it with a handful of pollen, and having his naked body and erect penis smeared with honey.

The fantasy of initiation by a magical elder who recognizes you as The One is, of course, incredibly potent in our myth-hungry society (think of Dumbledore, Obi-Wan, Morpheus etc). Especially when the teacher passes away, as Bridge does at the end of the book, leaving the author as the last man in this ancient tradition. Buxton wrote: ‘Being the final student of any great teacher is typically perceived as being the supreme privilege.’

Buxton also claimed to have met a group of six mysterious women known as the Melissae, led by a Bee Mistress, who were all part of a female-only order of bee shamanism called the Path of Pollen, that stretched in an unbroken line through Celtic shamanism, and eastern European bee-keeping, all the way back to the Melissae or bee priestesses of Apollo in ancient Greece. The Melissae were Vivian, Morag, Fionulla, Devorah, Katarina and Nivetta. They were a cell of six, and supposedly there were other cells of six dotted across Europe.

The book was written in the purple prose of Edwardian romantic fiction:

I walked naked in the early-morning light, the few clouds glowing like coals fresh from a fire. I went down to the wine-colored sea, where a soft morning mist greeted me, and I watched the streaks of first sunlight, which Bridge spoke of as the Golden Arrows of Dawn. For a moment I sat, looking down at the faint light on the water and feeling the ash in my hair and between my toes, and then I hit the waves with a dive that stung my belly as I plunged into the water’s icy embrace. I then rose from the sea’s lustration as if reborn.

Some of the instances challenged even the most sympathetic reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. As one student of the Sacred Trust put it: ‘As soon as I met Buxton, who is a small man, I knew there is no way on Earth this man hunted and wrestled a deer to the ground, killed it with a handful of pollen, and then carried it several miles on his back.’

It’s possible that Buxton initially intended his book to be presented as a ‘teaching story’ rather than something literally real and true. Nonetheless, it was presented to the world as a non-fiction work of ‘ethnography’ by an ‘elected fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and member of the Oxford Anthropology Society’. It included an introduction by Professor Harrop, ‘chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Kent’, who made a telltale comparison between Buxton’s book and Carlos Castaneda’s (now debunked) Teachings of Don Juan. Professor Harrop contrasted ‘the nature of Castaneda’s beautiful but inconsistent tales with the absolute honesty that is a mark of Simon’s life and being.’ The book even won the ‘Canizares award for best non-fiction book in 2005’ (I have tried to find any other mention of the Canizares book awards online, but can’t).

As far-fetched as the story sounded, and despite the complete lack of evidence for European bee shamanism, many readers were deeply moved by Buxton’s tale, and some completely believed it – especially American women. The pop star Tori Amos read it and devoted an entire album to the concept of bee shamanism. She told an interviewee:

The medicine man, bee-master, medicine woman, bee-mistress, this goes all the way from Ireland to Wales, Cornwall, Lithuania, pockets where this ‘path of pollen’ as they call it, has been nurtured. They have been able to kind of fly below the radar screen and miss the Inquisition…

Another American who believed the story was spiritual seeker Ariella Daly, who would go on to teach a course in ‘European bee shamanism’ on the Shift Network. She tells me:

I was interested in pre-Christian traditions in relationship to women and the sacred feminine. When I read Simon’s book, I was overcome with a sense of familiarity and profound relief. Oh my God, something survived. That was my feeling. And I was not the only one. Over the years, American women in particular went to England to study at the Sacred Trust because there was a feeling of ‘here in the US I am a settler on unceded land. I want to connect to my roots. And over there is something that actually survived and has roots.’

The Path of Pollen

Two years after the book came out, the Sacred Trust started selling courses in the Path of Pollen. Buxton announced that the time was propitious to take this ancient secret tradition and turn it into a public course for paying clientele. Why? Because the world was in a great spiritual, psychological and ecological crisis and “when the bee ceases to hum, the world will cease to turn”.

It doesn’t appear that Buxton ever took on a male disciple. However, from 2006 the Sacred Trust started offering women-only courses in the ‘Path of Pollen’,  starting with a course called the Way of the Melissae.  

The Path of Pollen courses were taught by two British women in their early 30s - Kate Shela and Naomi Lewis. Kate Shela was a 5 Rhythms teacher who had taught previous courses with Simon Buxton. Naomi Lewis had studied photography at art school, was an early student of Buxton’s at the Sacred Trust, and then became his partner and a teacher of various courses herself, including Animal Spirit Medicine.

Kate Shela (left) and Naomi Lewis

Suddenly, Naomi and Kate were teaching the Way of the Melissae, and announcing that they were initiated into this tradition by the Bee Mistresses themselves!

The Sacred Trust website announced:

Had they just invented the whole thing up as a sort of improv surrealist theatre piece, or had Naomi and Kate genuinely been initiated by the Bee Mistresses into a centuries-old tradition?

Neither Naomi nor Simon made any public comment for this article. Kate Shela tells me:

Naomi and I created the Path of Pollen. Simon told us we had been bestowed by these women [the Bee Mistress and the Six Melissae] and he gave us a pile of papers and said ‘make this a course’. We thought these practices were coming directly from these women.

So Naomi and Kate really believed Simon’s story, despite him barely having mentioned it before? Naomi won’t comment, but Kate says: ‘I can’t speak for Naomi but I completely believed it. I would sometimes ask Simon about the Bee Mistress and the Six, who they were etc, and he would say ‘they don’t want to be found’.’

The question of the literal truth of the Bee Mistress and the entire Path of Pollen does not seem to have been a burning issue for students in the early years. But it would become so – and many students would come to feel they had been actively misled not just by Simon Buxton, but by Naomi Lewis as well.

By 2008 Naomi Lewis and Kate Shela were offering multiple courses in the Path of Pollen.

Some of the courses were just a weekend, others were three-years long. Women trained in them for many years. Here’s what one student, Marie, shared with me.

This is a list of what I did and how much I spent:

2010 - The Way of the Shaman £195 [taught by Buxton, not part of the Path of Pollen]

2011 - The Way of the Melissae £765

2011/12 - Arte Triptych Melissae £2265

2013 - Melissae Lyceum Lectorum £1200

2105 - Lyceum of the Lower Mouth £345

2016 - Secret Sister, Spirit Spouse £585

2106 - The Trembling Veil £585

2019 - Two Week Intensive Shamanic Training £2280 [not part of the women-only Path of Pollen]

2017/19 - The Return of The Pythoness £5664.10

A Grand Total of £13,884.10

The retreats (or ‘folds’) would take place at Ashton Lodge near Wimborne in Dorset, a piece of land big enough that women could ecstatically commune with the spirits without running into any dog-walkers. The folds involved groups of 20 or so women, and the typical Path of Pollen student was in their late 40s or 50s, although some students were in their 30s or 20s.

One American student says:

Ashton Lodge was on incredible land with these old, old trees. One old magical oak was said to have been planted by the hand of a druid.

A British student, Gabby, left a high-paid job in the city in her 40s and became immersed in spiritual seeking. She recalls:

Everybody loved going to Dorset, holing up in the middle of the woods for six days in a group. It was very intense. And you’d have these incredible, ecstatic experiences. It was such a bonding experience. I've made fantastic friends. Getting to walk in the woods at dawn every day felt wonderful. Now, I look back and wonder if anything of real substance or true wisdom was passed on.

Gabriela was a Welsh-Spanish student who had studied with a Peruvian (male) shaman but was wary of cultural appropriation. So she was excited to hear about a female-led, European tradition of shamanism. She enrolled for both Simon’s Shamanic Practitioner Course and Naomi’s Path of Pollen in 2015, when she was 23:

I spent so many weekends at Ashton Lodge it became like my second home. I was completely enamoured by it all. I felt like this is what a spiritual home feels like. This is what having a healthy relationship with women feels like. I never thought that it was anything other than what I was told it was.

The folds were mainly filled up with intense magical ceremonies and rituals.  Students would wear dresses for the ceremonies, sometimes all in white, other times in black with black veils. They were encouraged not to wear underwear so their ‘lower mouth’ was more open to the spirit world.

The rituals and ceremonies included: the Lemniscate Walk, in which participants would walk, dance or crawl in a figure of 8 (like a bee) to get into a trance state; Bee smoking, in which participants would use a bee smoker to cleanse their energies, a bit like saging; Fire sipping, in which participants would pinch at the flame of a candle and draw its energy down into their perineum; Black mirrors, in which participants would gaze into black mirrors to receive spirit-messages.

Participants were encouraged to ‘merge with the spirits’.  Gabriela says:

As an assistant, I was often picked to merge with the spirits for a ceremony. Naomi would tell me, ‘Gabriella, merge’. Sometimes at the beginning she would use touch or breath and I would go into a trance, merge with the spirit, and then transmit information.

Many of the recent rituals sound closer to the sex magic of Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, or Austin Osman Spare than anything normally associated with shamanism (let alone bee keeping). In one ritual, the students danced naked around a bee skep, and then smeared it with their ‘nectar’ (bodily fluids). In another workshop called Spirit Spouse, they were encouraged to visualize a Spirit lover while masturbating, to produce ‘spirit children’ (ie particular effects in the world, such as a new creative project).  Kate Shela says these sex magic rituals did not occur when she was there.

Chelsy, an American student who spent eight years studying on the Path of Pollen, recalls one particularly wild ceremony:

They separated us into groups. Naomi asked, who is vocal and who isn’t vocal (ie do you make a lot of noise during sex). They put us into a quiet and loud group. Then we were told to visualize our darkest fantasies over a broomstick, which symbolized a serpent.

Most of these ceremonies were preceded by a warm-up exercise called the Theatre of Ambiguity. Gabriela recollects:

You would begin to act in a way that was ambiguous or absurd. So you could be crawling, making dog sounds, banging on the wall. We’d act psychotic for 40 minutes, and then Naomi and other teachers would enter the room, you’d take your seats and the ceremony would begin. 

The ’point’ of all these rituals was to take people into altered states, without the use of drugs, so they could commune with the spirit world – the spirit of the bees, the spirit of the Bee Mistresses or Bee Master, the spirit of the fae or the Earth or Nature or Darkness or the Python, and so on.

None of this had anything to do with actual bees or bee-keeping, which was a surprise to some students – although several of them went on to become bee-keepers in their own right. Instead, the ultimate aim of the Path of Pollen was to become a shamanic practitioner or priestess, an initiate in the Path, and perhaps, for some, to offer shamanic healings or prophetic readings for money. Naomi and her colleagues trained students in the Pollen Method, a way of using ‘impersonal sexual energy’ to heal clients, including through the use of touch and bodily fluids.

But not every student wanted to build a career as a Path of Pollen healer or prophet. Some just wanted to be part of something ecstatic, magical and embodied with a group of sisters. And the fact that it was an ancient and previously secret lineage hugely increased the sense of occasion.

One student, Marie, says:

It was pretty special to feel a part of a sacred tradition and to want to carry on that work out into the world.  I felt like I was tapping into an important ancestral calling from a line of women who knew the secrets of magic, alchemy and how to live a potent life. 

And students got to be close to the carriers of the tradition – Simon Buxton, the last Bee Master, and Naomi Lewis, who had been initiated into the tradition and trained by the Bee Mistress herself.

Chelsy recalls:

There was always a lot of jockeying politically to be like close to Simon and Naomi. They really manufactured this air of mystery and stardom, and people wanted to be the favourite. And they played into that a lot, because I think that was the whole point for them.

Gabriela says:

Naomi really was the Queen Bee. She made me her assistant early on, and I spent days working with her, but she told me not to tell the other women as it would make them jealous. During the ceremonies, she wouldn’t really acknowledge me, which was confusing for me, and for the other students as they knew I was her assistant.

Chelsy says: ‘They’d say there was no hierarchy, but there was so much hierarchy’. The teachers ate on a separate table, and Naomi had minimal interaction with the students outside of ceremonies, retreating to a private cottage. Gabriela recalls:

The women had huge respect for Naomi. I think they were afraid of her. She’s a small woman but she commands the room. And she’s very cold. She has a superiority, a regalness, about her. She’s very articulate and beautiful. I think many women wanted to be like Naomi. I did for a long time. People even changed their hair and dress to look like her. I noticed one of the assistants wore the same brand of sock as her. Naomi would say to me ‘you have to let me mould you if you want to learn to teach this work’.

Naomi could be remote, cold, harsh and mocking – students and teachers recall instances of her laughing at them and belittling them. She would say ‘if you think I’m tough with you, you should have met the Bee Mistresses. They used to hit us with sticks’. But one old-timer says: ‘I think underneath it all she was terrified.’

Bee-wildered

For every person who had wonderful experiences at Ashton Lodge, there was another who came away feeling hurt or even traumatized. One person developed seizures from the intense exercises. At least two had psychotic episodes. One student in an altered state found herself standing on a bridge in the nearby town, preparing to throw herself off it.

The shamanic courses with Simon were just as intense. People dug their own graves and spent a night in them (and paid a large amount of money for the experience). One student, Emma, recalls:

I was dropped out of a tree. My clan members were supposed to catch me, but Simon rushed the instructions and didn’t demo it at all and I was dropped about 10ft from the tree backwards and no one caught me. I could have been very badly injured at the very least. Luckily I only had a very bruised body and concussion for a month. I needed lots of osteopathy. There was no compensation offered.

Another ceremony in a course run by Simon was called Dark and Bright Mirrors. Participants were invited to be naked and then were confronted by eight ‘spirits’ (ie other students or teachers who had ‘merged with the spirits’) who would say the worst things they could think of about you. Gabriela remembers:

I was told by the spirit of Bridge, and sorry for my language, that I go down to the underworld and let myself be fucked in every orifice by the demons there, and when am I going to learn to stop letting people do whatever they want and stand up for myself.

Another student says: ‘Many of us were deeply traumatised by this process. I was very very traumatised by it and I am still processing some of it now years later. It was horrific.’

When students developed mental health problems during or after a course, there was minimal support or care. Students were told by Simon or Naomi ‘this isn’t psychotherapy, take it to the spirits’ , ‘journey on it’, or ‘walk the land’. Kate Shela says: ‘When I was teaching at The Sacred Trust, I was fully available to talk and be present if students who were having a difficult time. Even when this went against official ST policy.’ Some students agree things got worse once she left.

Chelsy says:

A lot of the stuff that we did was the kind of work that you need mental and psychological support for afterwards. And they told us, pointedly, we don't do that. If you had signed up for it, it was on you. But we didn't actually know what we were signing up for. So there were a lot of people who ended up losing their minds for a while, including myself.

What little care or support there was, was provided by other participants or by the assistants, who were either unpaid or paid £50-100 a day.

In recent years, Naomi’s cold, curt, rude behaviour started to feel abusive. Marie, a long-term student of the Path of Pollen, says:

I did not like how some of the women were being treated by Naomi.  She treated two women who were assisting her appallingly and if this had been out in the secular world, I believe she would have been held accountable. Towards the end of the training I felt like she actually hated us.  

Gabriela, one of Naomi’s assistants, says:

The more I questioned the tradition and its sources, the worse Naomi treated me. It got to the point where I really dreaded going to work there, because of how she belittled me. She would shout at me for preparing her breakfast wrong, because I used one stick of celery rather than two for her smoothie.

There was a particular lack of care during the pandemic. One student says:

During lockdown, I was registered with a number of teachers and spiritual communities, and almost all of them went out of their way to communicate and provide support in this period of huge uncertainty. The Sacred Trust just went silent. They disappeared. No communication. Nobody told us ‘everything is cancelled’. In 2022, when things opened up again, everyone flew in for another fold, and we were told the day before it had been cancelled. They were quite appalling in their handling of people.

This lack of care and lack of communication became a serious issue in 2023, when the entire myth of European bee shamanism started to unravel.

The unravelling

There had been rumours for years that Buxton’s work was plagiarised or simply made up. The first rumblings came from Ross Heaven, British occultist and one-time friend and business partner of Buxton’s. They ‘always had a competitive aspect to their friendship’, according to one person who knew them both, and they fell out in a big way shortly after the publication of The Shamanic Way of the Bee in 2004. 

In 2005, Heaven took Buxton to court, mainly over who owned the trademark of Darkness Visible for the darkness-immersion practices the two had taught together. During the court case, Ross Heaven also claimed that he had ghost-written large parts of The Shamanic Way of the Bee and not been paid for his work. The court papers read:

Mr Heaven also states that this was written as a work of fiction, a fantasy… Mr  Heaven states that his relationship [with Buxton] deteriorated after the publication of The Shamanic Way of the Bee; in particular: it was published as a work of nonfiction, his involvement in it was not mentioned and he never received any payment for the work (as promised).

Over the following years, Heaven would repeat these claims online. In an online interview with the Bad Witch blog in 2013, he pointed out several passages of Bridge’s teachings in Buxton’s book were plagiarised from an obscure essay called What the Bee Knows by PL Travers, the author of Mary Poppins and an enthusiastic occultist.

Rumours about Buxton’s plagiarism of PL Travers were whispered by students, but they never came out into the open. Instead, senior figures from the Sacred Trust quietly and suddenly left, and didn’t say why.

In 2015, one teacher was surprised to discover that a student, Ariella Daly, completely believed the entire tradition. The teacher tried to gently break it to her that it was a fiction. Ariella tells me she then went back to Naomi and Simon with this bombshell, and was invited for a private conversation with Simon. Buxton reassured her the tradition was real and Ariella believed him. ‘I had never encountered a pathological liar before’, she tells me. Meanwhile, the teacher who’d spilled the beans was quietly pushed out.  

In 2016 Kate Shela left. She never told students why but has told me:

I was shocked by the citation issue and it shook my naive faith in him. I did not suspect that the whole book was made up, just that he had lifted nine paragraphs [from PL Travers]. I confronted Simon and he promised to name the plagiarisms with a letter to his publishers and to make them public. I believed he would sort out his 'oversight’. I believed the whole matter would be taken care of in house by The Sacred Trust and I completely trusted him to take full responsibility and make it good.  My working relationship came to a close because it no longer felt congruent to work with them anymore.

She adds that she suspected Simon had drawn on her own life-story for the book – she had an eastern European great-grandmother called Devorah, and one of the Six Melissae in Buxton’s book was an eastern European called Devorah.

Another teacher left when they uncovered instances of further plagiarisms. In 2021, Gabriela walked away as well. She had become frustrated by the lack of clarity over the origins of the practices and started to question if the tradition really existed. She asked for a meeting with Simon:

We must have spent an hour and a half in his living room talking, and what’s really weird about that conversation is, it’s like a fog. He’s a master at manipulating language and it sounds like you’ve got an answer, but actually there’s nothing there.

In 2021, the name of this ‘ancient, unbroken’ tradition was quietly changed from the Path of Pollen to the Lyceum. Shortly afterwards, the website stopped referring to a ‘tradition’ and instead referred to a ‘conclave’. The blurb now read:

The Melissae draw their inspiration from a different spring than most: it is an arcane discipline, a vein, an underground working – difficult to trace but easy to recognise once encountered.

Difficult to trace…as in don’t go to the Baltics looking for the Bee Mistress, as some students were keen to do.

Despite these rumours and the departure of several senior teachers, there was no public reckoning. Anyone with questions about origins, sources and cold, hard facts was either discouraged or invited for a special private interview with Simon and / or Naomi, from which they either emerged re-convinced, or they quietly left the school. The Sacred Trust was still growing as shamanism became more and more popular. And it was beginning to build a mass audience in the US, thanks to one student – Ariella Daly – offering a course on bee shamanism on the Shift Network, the biggest platform for New Age teachings.

And then in August 2023, an American Path of Pollen practitioner – Chelsy - decided to go public with her doubts about ‘European bee shamanism’. Chelsy had begun to suspect that the whole thing was made up and plagiarised – Bridge, the Bee Mistress and the Six Sisters, the entire Path of Pollen. She was handed information by other students who had become disenchanted and suspicious, and she did her own digging around.

She came across other anomalies besides the passages from PL Travers  – some passages from Rudolf Steiner that had also been plagiarised without credit, some similarities between the rituals of the book and the Navajo ‘Path of Pollen’, including the ritual of hunting a stag and killing it with pollen. A photo of a supposed ‘elder’ of the tradition from the Sacred Trust’s website turned out to be taken from an ordinary book on bee-keeping.

An image from the Sacred Trust website

In August 2023, Chelsy posted an Instagram story-thread sharing her concerns. You can see how nervous she is as she pushes against the Sacred Trust’s culture of secrecy and hierarchy. She tells me: ‘I knew that I was going to get eaten alive by the students and the teachers.’

Chelsy’s public questioning had an enormous impact on some students. Marie, another student who’d invested thousands of pounds and ten years of her life in the Sacred Trust courses, tells me:

I felt completely frozen for the first few hours when I found out about the plagiarism.  And then a rush of utter sickness propelled me into an internal free fall.  It was one huge out-of-body experience as I mentally ran through what it all meant and the implications of all my spiritual work, not least my client work and my own private practice.  It was as if my husband came home and confessed to me he's been having an affair. Who were these people???...  I was plunged into a very real and very vicious spiritual crises, which I am still yet navigating.

Questions that had been whispered in private were now being openly asked by students of the school – led by Chelsy and Marie. Why not acknowledge the passages from PL Travers and other sources? If the words of Bridge were lifted from older books, did he really exist? How about the Bee Mistresses? Is this really an unbroken ancient lineage? Where do these practices come from?

In September 2023, Simon Buxton agreed to a Zoom call with Chelsy and another student. He does not seem to have been prepared for the forensic grilling he would receive at Chelsy’s hands, and seemed confident he could talk his audience around.

Was Bridge real? Yes, he insisted. Was it an unbroken ancient lineage? Who knows. Why didn’t he acknowledge the passages from PL Travers? He claimed to be a close personal friend of Travers through her son, Cam, who he said he met at the British Library. It was PL Travers, he said, who introduced him to Bridge. He had used her words in his book and then realized to his horror afterwards that the book was published without acknowledging her. But he assured Chelsy he had contacted Inner Traditions and they agreed they would put in the proper acknowledgement in a future edition.

Yet one could see through the tall tales even as he weaved them. Despite claiming to be a very close friend of PL Travers and her son Camilus, he didn’t know Cam had any children. Buxton wept as he said Cam had died at a young age – in fact he lived to 71. It later turned out Cam didn’t possess a British Library reading card. No one at Inner Traditions has said they have been contacted by Buxton about any plagiarism or need for a new edition of the book. 

Buxton also let slip a fatal admission. He said that Naomi Lewis, by then his ex-partner, had never actually met with the Bee Mistresses or trained with them in person. She had only received ‘telephonic communication’. That was in contradiction with what multiple students (eleven of them) say that Naomi told them - that she had received extensive in-person training and initiation from the mysterious Bee Mistress and the Melissae.

Buxton ended the zoom in tears:

When Bridge used to talk about ethics he would say one of the greatest spiritual crimes is when you do something that pushes someone away from their rightful spiritual path…I had broken the Sacred Trust…Which is why I come before you today to stand before you naked. I want to continue to make myself available…to repair this…Even if just one person wants to engage with the teaching again…that’s enough motivation to make myself available to all of you.

After this car-crash conversation, Naomi contacted Chelsy to demand that she not share the video with any students. Chelsy and Marie also received a fair amount of pushback from students of the Sacred Trust, who suggested they were spoiling it for everyone with their insistence on truth. Things became heated. Kate Shela says: ‘The Sacred Trust was vilifying Marie and Chelsy.’ Gabriela says: ‘People don’t like it when you question their religion, and this had become a religion.’

Meanwhile, the students kept on digging. Chelsy discovered websites where you can upload documents to check for plagiarism, so she uploaded the manuscript of The Shamanic Way of the Bee, and it turned up 70 instances of copy-and-paste plagiarism, from 31 different authors – including Welsh occultist and novelist Dion Fortune (whose husband Thomas Penry Evans is thought to have been an inspiration for Bridge and whose magical name was also Bid Ben Bid Bont), and another British female occultist, the Surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun. It turned out Buxton had actually known Colquhoun in her later years, and Colquhoun experts think Buxton has his hands on some of her unpublished papers and possessions.

Stealing from Remarkable Women: from left to right, PL Travers, Dion Fortune and Ithell Colquhoun, three pioneering British occultists whose work Buxton copy-and-pasted without credit for his book

Many of the rituals and practices originated elsewhere – fire-sipping came from Toltec shamanism, ‘nectars’ and ‘roses’ (ie chakras) come from Asian Tantra, walking in a figure of eight comes from Yoga. Even the Path of Pollen’s logo seems to have been lifted from Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis:

On the left, the logo of Crowley’s OTO, and on the right the logo of the Path of Pollen

Buxton was well and truly busted for extensive copy-and-paste plagiarism. And if so many of Bridge’s words were copy-and-pasted from other people, then did he really exist? Was his real name Abridged?

Meanwhile, there was no word from Simon or Naomi. Finally, on New Year’s Eve 2023, Naomi sent out an email to a few select students:

Whilst living in Cornwall there was a woman who phoned on numerous occasions who was Lithuanian American as I understand it and whom I was led to understand was Vivienne [the Bee Mistress from Buxton’s book] - I have been told latterly by Simon, in the aforementioned meeting, her actual name was Vivian and that she was indeed a beekeeper.  We had interactions that I would frame at the time, knowing what I know about shamanism now, as transmissions.  I now question who she was and why she was phoning - but I doubt I will now ever have clarity around that.

This would be the first historical example of a shamanic initiation by a complete stranger on the telephone.

Lewis went on:  

It has been a tremendous personal and professional shock to me to discover I was led to believe all this, not least because of all the years of teaching this work entirely unknowingly as to its true origins and thinking them as stated above.  It is something that will take time to process. Any further queries concerning this matter should be addressed to Simon Buxton at The Sacred Trust.

Yes, she was shocked, shocked, to discover her romantic and business partner for almost two decades might have been making up the tradition in which she claimed to be an initiated priestess.

The same month, the remaining teachers on the Path of Pollen, including Naomi, sent out the following email announcing their resignation from the Sacred Trust:

We feel from what Simon told us on the call we had with him in recent weeks, that the majority of the work known as the teachings of the Path of Pollen, were 'downloaded' (via meditation/dreaming etc)  to him, rather than told to him face to face….Having sought as much clarity as we could, we came away from this Zoom call unable to truly discern whether there were any teachings that were gifted to Simon in person, or whether the practices and theory came as meditations from a tutelary spirit(s)…

The teachers went on:

It is true that we are distressed about being misled. But neither will we partake in the polarised cancel culture of our times. Considerable errors of judgment were made by Simon and this is why those of us that were faculty left The Sacred Trust. However, this body of work has proved to be an immense gift to many (including us) and so our focus moving onward is on how a healing story might be born of this for us all. 

The ’healing story’ Naomi has tried to present is that she is herself a victim of Simon’s delusion / deceit rather than in any way responsible herself for selling a lie for 20 years and letting people invest their time, money, faith and bodies in a fake tradition. Some students believed her new story, others thought this was preposterous considering the many instances where (according to them) she said she’d received direct in-person training from the Bee Mistress. ‘Did the Bee Mistress hit her with a stick over the phone?’ asks one student.

I asked Kate if she felt she or Naomi ever misled students. She told me:

Did I ever say I worked with these women in person – no. Never. Do I understand why some women may feel this was implied – Yes. The work was real to me. I was working with my teachers - but not in the physical realm.  Naomi told me she had phone conversations with the Bee Mistress`Vivienne' and I believed her – and so I have been in the room when she spoke to that and I didn’t say otherwise. I don’t know what Naomi has claimed since, as I was not in those rooms and I have no contact with her.

Meanwhile, the fall-out from this public reckoning continued to ripple out. In early 2024, the Shift Network pulled Ariella Daly’s course in European bee shamanism. An email from the Network said:

The Shift Network takes a particularly strong stance against individuals who mislead people in the name of spirituality. We are saddened to learn about the extent of Buxton’s deception and the lives that have been impacted.

Ariella feels bruised by how the Shift Network treated her, and how she feels other Sacred Trust students treated her. Meanwhile, some students feel she shouldn’t have kept on selling courses in ‘European bee shamanism’ when it was clear the tradition was fake. She still sells courses mentioning ‘European bee shamanism’. She says: ‘a lot of my students say ‘These practices are beautiful. It doesn't matter where they came from’.’ She also still believes Naomi was wronged: ‘Unless she is a pathological liar, she did not know about [Buxton’s deceptions].’

Inner Traditions, Professor Harrop of Kent University, the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Oxford Anthropology Society all did not reply to emails seeking comment.

So what?

This is not the first time a New Age teacher has made up ancient teachings or secret Masters in order to find a following. One could mention the Rosicrucians, Joseph Smith, Madame Blavatsky, GI Gurdjieff, George Gardner, L Ron Hubbard, Carlos Castaneda – the list goes on. Occultists tend to be fantasists – sometimes they literally write fantasy novels – for whom the line between fact and fiction can get blurry. Simon Buxton is not the first spiritual teacher to be exposed for making up a myth and selling it as real, and he won’t be the last.

As one British occultist who knew Buxton years ago remarks:

The business model is one that is often used in New Age deceptive marketing…create a fake “tradition” or “secret knowledge” and pad it out with content illegally copied verbatim from published books by various authors and sources, without permission. Then charge as much as possible for “unique” classes or “advanced “training courses. The point being that it takes time before the fraud is discovered, and by then it is all too late.

Does it matter?

There are three serious ethical and potentially legal issues:

1. There is Buxton’s plagiarism of multiple sources, including many female artists and writers like Ithell Colquhoun, Dion Fortune and PL Travers – as well as Navajo Indians. The plagiarism is extensive and flagrant. For this alone, Inner Traditions / Simon & Schuster should withdraw the book or republish it with proper referencing.

2. There’s the fact Buxton, Lewis and other Path of Pollen teachers sold customers a made-up tradition and presented it as real, that Buxton said he was an ‘elder in the Path of Pollen’ and Lewis said she was directly initiated and trained by the Bee Mistress and Melissae – at least, that’s what multiple students heard her say. I’m not sure to what extent Kate Shela also participated in this myth-making. She insists she believed it all and never knowingly misled students. Nor do I know what other teachers on the Path of Pollen felt about the literal truth of what they taught.

Buxton could have avoided all this, if he’d accredited his sources, not copy-and-pasted them, said his book was a ‘teaching story’ like the Celestine Prophecy, The Alchemist or The Secret. But it was sold as non-fiction, and women really believed it and invested in it.

Chelsy says:

If you decide to take other people’s work, most of them women, hide their names alongside the sources of your body of work, invent credentials, and then make yourself the only emissary of that information (information the original writers intended to be free and available in their books and their own bodies of work), there really is only one reason to do that. Exclusivity. So that people must come to you and so that people understand you’re the chosen one. You become the only man/person to offer this to a group of women and allow them access.

But isn’t it fun to be wrapped up in an enchanting myth for a few days of the year? Didn’t they do beautiful work, didn’t they encourage people to become bee-keepers? A few students feel like that. Most that I’ve spoken to feel truly wounded and betrayed. Emma tells me:

They pretended they were teaching shamanism and that this came from the Bee Mistress and Simon’s knowledge from the Bee Master. That is so psychologically, spiritually and emotionally damaging I haven’t got the words to describe how bad it is and the devastation it has caused. I feel duped, betrayed, lied to, manipulated and sucked in, and it has had a profound affect on my view of spiritual practise.

People spent thousands of dollars on the Path, built their careers on it and sold it to other students as real, students who were academics wrote papers about it and staked their reputations on it. They trusted it and gave their minds and bodies to the practices, safe in the certainty it was an ancient lineage and behind it were the Bee Mistress and Melissae, supporting them from beyond the veil. No wonder they were furious to discover they’d been duped. 

For the teachers, no doubt the last year has been ‘hell’, as one of them describes it, as they’ve suddenly faced the online wrath of students. It’s been described as a ‘witch-hunt’ or ‘cancel culture’ to me. Teachers say they’ve received abusive emails and legal threats from former friends or total strangers. In other words, they’re surprised by students’ fury at discovering they have been sold a myth (or, if you prefer, a lie). Kate Shela tells me:

It was terrifying because I’d been out of the Sacred Trust for eight years, and I'm now walking into the middle of a situation of rage. I got the most horrendous emails from people I’d never met, just because we had seeded the work.

One veteran of the Sacred Trust says: 

I think it was never as cynical as it could sound. There was just a profound lack of thought around what would happen if you present people with a false path and then charge them money to come and study on this false path. I think the idea that anyone might ever be angry about it never crossed their minds. because as far as they were concerned (this is supposition) ‘we can retrieve and co-create with the spirits a really potent series of practices’. They’re presenting all this stuff as having this really strong tradition, you know, ‘the Sister Six holding us all behind the veil’, and they're not fucking there.  If you came to this work believing that the book was verbatim truth, then you were going to end up in freefall.

Freefall is precisely what students report. Gabby says:

The shared feeling among students was utter betrayal. The rug was pulled from under us.

Gabriela says:

It was probably the biggest heartbreak I've ever had. I felt like I lost not only my teachers, but my friends, my orientation. I was so clear that this was a body of work that allowed me to place myself in the world. When that fell away, I felt adrift.

3. Finally, the Path of Pollen was packaged and sold as shamanic healing, when really it turned out to be largely occult sex magic, i.e hardcore practices not directed to ‘healing’. Not telling people this is denying them informed consent and leaving them bewildered as to where these practices come from and what spirits they invited into their minds and bodies.

Marie, a long-time student, says:

The problem with this now with my own experience of practising the Path of Pollen in a room full of women where some were climaxing, is that this most deep, private and exposing work is not held in the architecture of a gynocentric female shamanic tradition that we all thought it to be. There were no other women of 'these ways' who had been practising this for centuries as understood within the safety of The Path of Pollen. It is occult work and this is what is triggering women. There is also the serious issue of permission. Going into what is believed to be a shamanic practice but what is actually an occult practice is denying a woman important agency over her decisions and boundaries.

Spiritual fraud

Chelsy and Marie, who did the most work exposing the plagiarism, are demanding a refund for the roughly £13,000 they each spent on Sacred Trust / Path of Pollen courses over the last decade. Because of the lack of response, they are now threatening legal action against Buxton, Lewis and other Path of Pollen teachers for what, in their lawyer’s opinion, is ‘a RICO conspiracy to defraud spiritually seeking persons for their own financial benefit’. The damages in this case could be of the order of $150,000 each, but both students hope the Sacred Trust will simply refund them what they spent on courses.  

There’s been no further public comment from Naomi. She’s now returned to her career as a photographer and is offering classes in ‘the animist arts’. Buxton is still offering courses at the Sacred Trust, and didn’t reply to our emails. Why, ask students, doesn’t he just come clean, say sorry, and admit he plagiarised multiple sources and made the whole thing up? One reason might be that he would then perjure himself – he said in the 2005 court case with Ross Heaven that ‘in 1986 he was inducted into a small, private shamanic group of ‘bee-keepers’ known as ‘The Path of Pollen’. Perhaps he’s worried that if he did admit to extensive plagiarism and lying, he could be liable for fraud. Other teachers are worried about being sued for fraud, and this may be why no one wants to say publicly that they knew the tradition was made up. But what students seem to want now is just some honesty and accountability.

Gabriela says:

Spiritual teachers who have caused this amount of harm should have the decency to step down. What’s unforgivable is all the chances they have had to come clean and not done so.

Privately, some of the Path of Pollen teachers have come out and said sorry to the students. Kate tells me: ‘I feel ashamed that I was duped and consequently led other women to believe that the tradition was true.’  Another teacher apologised to students in a Facebook group for alumni. But there’s still no public apology or admission of guilt from Simon, Naomi or other Path of Pollen teachers.

What’s the take-away? The story of the Sacred Trust, like other stories of New Age bullshit, speaks to the lack of safe cultural containers for ecstatic experiences in western civilization, the lack of traditions, maps and elders. And that lack creates a market opportunity for story-tellers to weave enticing fictions out of thin air.

Jez Hughes, a leading British shaman, says:

There is a question of integrity. If you're going to make up a story, do not present it as truth, because it's deeply damaging. We’re trying to be taken seriously as a re-emerging animism. That’s my life mission. It’s hard enough already, because obviously it’s a fringe tradition and there are issues around cultural appropriation. This situation just puts us back.

Be careful what you believe, be careful who you trust. Balance your capacity to surrender into trance states with a capacity to say ‘sorry…what?’  Ecstatic experiences are powerful and transporting, and can feel truly monumental at the time, but unless they’re grounded on strong ethical foundations, they’re just noise.

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