This is written from the inside of 'European shamanism", but nevertheless a very interesting and thorough investigation into Simon Buxton's fraud over the last two decades:
https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/the-invention-of-european-bee-shamanismThe invention of European bee shamanism
A British shamanic school is accused of 'conspiracy to defraud spiritually seeking persons for their own financial benefit'
Jules Evans Sep 21, 2024
This is a long, strange story, so make a cup of tea, find a comfy seat and dive in. It’s free for a month …
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
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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.
