What happens in Dorset, stays in Dorset.
It was 1986, the year Diego Maradona knocked England out of the World Cup with his hand, and Simon Buxton was running a high-end New Age store called Arcania, in the south-west of England. Buxton, a short man with dark features, supposedly became the last person to be inducted into an obscure shamanic lineage of beekeepers.
The initiation rites to join the ‘Path of Pollen’ – a spiritual tradition that claimed to be an 800-year-old lineage of bee shamans – required him to catch a stag with a large net and suffocate it to death with pollen. Despite his own misgivings, he successfully slayed the beast after a days-long hunt in the woods. ‘I began to weep as I felt his life ebb away,’ he recalled in his book The Shamanic Way of the Bee. ‘I climbed upon the warm body and held him, as if I were riding him to Hades.’
Then, his teacher, ‘Bridge’ – who hailed from Wales, where bee shamanism was said to have originated – buried Buxton alive overnight as part of a gruelling, transformative ritual, with only one of the stag’s hollowed-out bones to breathe through from beneath the ground. ‘The womb of the Earth now felt like [a] monster’s jaws – a vagina dentata,’ Buxton wrote, as he worked through his primal fears underground. ‘I moved into overwhelming and engulfing fear for my life.’
Buxton survived to tell the tale, moving on to the next stage of his arduous induction. His naked body was to be smeared with a honey ointment by a woman named Vivienne. She ‘commandingly applied the sticky fluid to [Buxton’s] phallus’ before he got an erection ‘against [his] will’, he wrote, and a colony of bees licked the nectar from his body in an orgasmic spectacle.
The tale seems far-fetched, but given that bees help to sustain the plant kingdom through pollination, why wouldn’t a mystical tradition emerge around them? It starts to chime, if you think about it: the life-giving elixir of honey.
Buxton was soon teaching his own popular shamanic training programmes, constructing a grandiose myth around himself. He was seemingly seeking the power, wealth and adoration he had seen other shamans enjoy, and this search culminated in his 2004 book The Shamanic Way of the Bee.
It turned out to be something of a success, or at least, Buxton claimed it was. He said it won the suspiciously little-known 2005 Canizares Book Award for non-fiction. Buxton got a foreword from an anthropology professor at the University of Kent, became a fellow at the esteemed Royal Anthropological Institute, and won plaudits from popstar Tori Amos, who made a whole album around the concept of bee shamanism. ‘Bee Master, Simon Buxton, takes us on his shaman’s journey that unveils a tradition that has been held sacred for thousands of years,’ Amos wrote. ‘After reading this book, I felt I had been initiated into the ancient feminine mystery of sacred sexuality.’
The next year, he directed his then-partner, Naomi Lewis, to convert the book’s lessons into a course designed exclusively for women. Like Buxton’s own initiation, this was not for the faint-hearted. Buxton had already founded the Sacred Trust in Wimborne, Dorset, to facilitate the teaching of the Path of Pollen, as well as his core shamanism, a solitary darkness retreat, and ‘sacred burial’ programmes. Hundreds of women went on to walk the path, paying thousands of pounds for the honour.
Many of the female students attest to the benefits they gleaned from the intense courses, which included a bizarre practice in which they were directed to visualise lovers while masturbating to create ‘spirit babies’. Separately, the women would be directed to act psychotically for hours, by repeatedly moving in a bee-like figure of eight, until they reached fevered, ecstatic states, and entered the spirit realm and attained its fruits. There were also urine-drinking and broomstick exercises.
‘They told us it was an unbroken folk tradition from Lithuania,’ says Chelsy Arbor, an artist who took a series of courses as part of the path. ‘It was so unlike any of the other healing and shamanic trainings available, and I’ve been around the world.’ The ceremonies and rituals made it all seem palpable. ‘We all believed that it was real, and that we were communing with the spirits of this tradition,’ Arber adds.
Through all of this, Buxton became a wealthy man. But over the years, Arber and some of the other students identified holes in the narrative and sought clarification. They claim they were ostracised and treated with disdain as a result. Events reached fever pitch when Arber posted a series of Instagram stories in August 2023, detailing the obvious plagiarism in large chunks of the book, notably from Mary Poppins author Pamela Travers, and the lifting of Aleister Crowleyan symbols, exposing the whole story as a mishmash of occult, shamanic and animist practices. In short, the ancient tradition of bee shamanism was a complete invention.
Arber blew the whistle on what had gradually become a toxic cult where members would compete for Buxton and Lewis’s favour. As doubts rippled through the school, ‘it just started to fall apart’. Already there had been fractures. There were reports of women being unable to exit the psychotic state they had been guided into. One suffered seizures before nearly throwing herself off a bridge in the local town.
But Sara Rothwell, who was Lewis’s assistant, says that to call ‘bee shamanism’ fake discounts the spiritual transformations that some experienced. ‘Even if this work was a reconstruction rather than an intact lineage, the pulse of this work remains alive, and I continue to engage with it in ways that feel right for me,’ she says. ‘There has been much talk about how this lineage never existed, and how a group of dim-witted, spiritual-seeking women were somehow duped into joining a so-called sex cult. The notion is laughable. If this lineage did not exist before, it certainly does now.’
Still, it all caused Lewis to suffer an apparent crisis as she realised she had been manipulated by Buxton, whom she had separated from in 2019, after travelling to Lithuania on a doomed mission to find traces of the elusive bee shamanism tradition. She found nothing. ‘His coercive behaviour continued throughout our relationship,’ she told the shamanism magazine Sacred Hoop. ‘I believed his stories and I remain ashamed of the impact they had on others. I am deeply sorry.’
Buxton has vanished. The Sacred Trust website disappeared. His teachings ceased. Rothwell calls this ‘the rupture’, leaving behind a curious legacy of shamanic beekeeping – which a few people in the UK still practise – and a group of women left shattered. Buxton’s ‘litany of lies is astonishing’, says Arber. ‘I think the man is dangerously delusional – like most cult leaders.’ Needless to say, there is no record online of the book award Buxton was supposed to have won.
