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.
