Distaff Ways: Weaving

'Everything is born of woman.' The Bee Mistress plagiarising Harley Swiftdeer Reagan, who in turn was stealing from Native American wisdom.*

Walking into the hush of a semi-darkened room, the sun flame of a beeswax candle possessing its centre, the hypnotic scent from the heart of the hive mingling with forest resin apothecary smoke pluming up from a bitten chunk of propolis, large black mirrors laid flat out, their inky voids tantalisingly exposed, each corner touching to create the Hex, a glyph most deeply cherished, the one sacred to all, ancestral chords chimed within the barefoot women come to seek out what was an inscrutable, yet palpable calling.

We had come for the teachings of the enigmatic Bee Mistress. To fold ourselves into the skirts of this Queen of Synchronicity, she who was the magnetic initiator spilling over us in a compelling transfusion of Mother, Teacher, Void Scribe, Ruthless Ally and Darkness Seer. She who would nominate our 'type'. We had come to meet a Six Sister as a mirror to gifts we barely dared yet own but craved. We had come to soak in the magic of shamanic tradition which held women at its zenith, a secret tradition faithfully preserved and handed down so that we may continue to carry its archaic teachings. We had come at the silent call of longing from those who stood behind us, Sistrams beating out the rhythms of our hearts, laboratories ignited, poised at the tip of life-changing revelations. We had come to heal and be healed. We had come to be seen and to be seers. We came because a book left us open-mouthed.

And it felt like no small salvation.

Being a woman in this world, at times, feels Sisyphian. Pushing and being pushed through cycle after cycle. Many times woefully under prepared. More times barely holding coherent understanding as any meaning offered by the over-culture is ever tainted out of our favour. Natural seekers, thinkers, feelers but also tightrope walkers of this man's world, we'd come to the Sacred Trust to sit in a space specifically carved out for us. To reclaim our lost holy rights from bloodied religions and male god spiritual pantheons. And as injustice is so utterly familiar to us it barely registers in everyday life, to be in a justified space was a revelation. Sitting in a circle, our workaday world slowly dripping away, the spark of becoming wholly and holy aligned quietly igniting into consciousness, this specific and sacred women’s work was a quivering gift. We know what is ours when we encounter it.

We women hold particular and undeniable strains of intuition, knowings and otherworldly connections which thrum through our bodies and our psyches. Our ability to draw sanctified architectural forms and draught inner temples to and from each other remains unsurpassed. Men see this and do six things: Support it, deny it, twist it, ignore it, crush it, or steal it. These are the forces we must bend ourselves around in order to manifest our potential. It’s a rare woman who is utterly heedless and completely fearless in the face of the male spiritual lens. But she does exist. We thought we were meeting her.

The work of the Path of Pollen, to whatever extent women chose to immerse themselves, held this visceral and potent beauty. It offered ways into our bodily wisdoms that were profound and, for many, her work at this place was a clear re-membering, a place to revere the magic of her own somatic alchemy within a spiritual framework seemingly uncolonised by patriarchy. It felt like a place to safely rest. Even when the work demanded a journey to the edges of her being and sting was given through admonition, this was taken as merciless love necessary to strip away that which was no longer serving and for a woman to see the wild self crouching under herself. The rich roots of 'The Tradition' and practises were held as sacrosanct and the act of surrender within each woman was ever humbling and tender to witness.

So it is precisely because of the transformative nature of the work, the deep friendships formed and the dedication with which women offered themselves to be in service of this work, that the truth about this path was asked for when it began to unravel. The Path of Pollen was literally embedded within the noetic and physical daily practices of so many women and the ‘Tradition’ formed an intimate web of lives both personally professionally. Skeins of secret allies, spirits, hives, oracular uttering, dream seeing and the ancient lineage we’d been grafted onto began to feel frighteningly shaky when the shallow grave it was been buried in heaved itself into daylight.

Since 2011 women were writing heartfelt letters asking to be considered for the ten day retreat, Melissae Lyceum Lectorum, so they may ‘move and have their beings in a similar fashion to the classical model and manner of the Melissae when residing together as a ‘cell’’. ¹ Because they wanted to immerse themselves in the living experience of the Six Sisters from both behind and before the ‘trembling veil.’² Women believed this way of being was how the Path of Pollen initiated women teaching them tenanted their own learning with their Bee Mistress, within their own cell of six. And they were receiving the deep Transmissions, Nektar instructions and Dream Cell Mirrors just as the women teaching them had being absorbed in them. Sun Salutations were offered daily, we felt the Melissae before us soaking in the Sky Star’s energy as an act of recalibration and devotion and we huddled together in the semi-darkness whispering our nightly incubations.

We took turns, like true initiates, in stepping out into the cold night air to thread our way to the tenebrous temple and pour our innermost magic into the cauldron of the oneiricell. We pressed ourselves into its rich beeswax dripped floor, stirring its fragrance with the heat of our bodies, shivering as the Bee Mistress plucked our dreams. We faithfully internalised the dynamics of Polarities within the Walk of the Eight. It was ten days of immense landscaping within ‘The Tradition’ and we were sinking everything we had into the consanguineal cells of the Path of Pollen daughters. Walking in their footsteps.

‘Walking in the footsteps’ of the women who had gone before was a big hitter. It was a frequent act and a near constant exhortation when Walking the Eight. A mesmerising way of creating neural and spiritual pathways to the ancestresses who’d gone before us in the work and we were ploughing the field for the women who were to come after us. This lemniscatic traversing was a fundamental and crucial act within every woman’s body of work. It was our safety valve, our way into seeing, our sacred map and our most advanced yet fundamental practice. The two loops marry the magic and hidden knowledge of our bodies. It’s the symbol poised between chthonic and stellar wisdom, keeping our seeing clear and tight.

We believed that cells of woman had been traversing this hidden map for centuries. Some women were told it was eight hundred years old. Many believed it to be older. The prerequisite workshop The Way of the Melissae was sold as ‘a well troden path for distaff members of the European shamanic tradition known as The Path of Pollen…a rare opportunity to work directly with women from The Path of Pollen who will be sharing teachings that have traditionally been passed down ‘from mouth to ear’.’³ We were asked to keep these teaching private. Any woman up for the Arte training signed a disclaimer promising not to publish anything she was taught, as she was being shown previously ‘unpublished’ material.

It was maintained practices were given from priestess to priestess from the very temple of Dephi. We believed this way into seeing and knowing had been passed down safely in oracular fashion and the work was only just beginning to peek it head over the parapet, now that, in our more modern and accepting times, the fear of persecution was safely passed. And that it was our sacred duty to embody this work, keep it pristine and carry the lineage forward. This was explicitly said, unequivocally taught.

And we believed the Bee Mistress was an actual, real, living and breathing woman. We believed Simon Buxton had met one and had passed through his own initiatory experience through her.

Curious women, which was pretty much all of us, were told the Bee Mistress in Simon’s book was happily living in rural Lithuania, and wasn’t interested in meeting any of us, so to not bother going looking. Even though some women tried, unsuccessfully, to find this Bee Mistress. We were also told, by the teachers, that when they travelled to Lithuania for their own tutelage, they looked for a Distaff planted in a dirt track, by the Bee Mistress, so they could find her house. It was called a ‘Distaff Teaching.’ Other spine tingling titbits were dropped. For instance, the Bee Mistress would give them a word or a sentence to take away and they would ‘typically’ spend the next six months in-between meetings pondering on the meaning behind this tutoring.

When woman asked Naomi Lewis if she was the Bee Mistress, they were told no, and if the Bee Mistress walked into the room they would know about it. Women on the very first workshop, when struggling with the discipline demanded of them, were told by Naomi that she’d been on the phone to Vivienne who wasn’t happy with them. This counsel produced a shiver of fear and focus. Ironically, this use of the telephone as a means of connection was a prescient uttering in light of Simon’s Zoom interview.

Naomi also spoke of a stack of papers given to her by the Path of Pollen elders and charged, by them, with mastering and transmitting these teaching and hence creating the body of work presented as this gynocentric shamanic path. She told us these papers were in disarray and it took her quite a bit of time to sort through them and bring out the work coherently. We were impressed. Were these the papers mysteriously referred to as The Apis Codex? The one Simon has on an old computer?

Women going through the second fold of the Arte Triptych Melissae, The Wise Maidens, were given Bridge’s actual bee smoker to use when learning to ‘smoke a client’. This produced no small anxiety, excitement, reference and hush when holding this sacred tool of an actual Bee Master. The Bee Master who brimmed over with spiritual wisdom and irresistible magic, the Bridge of Simon’s book who we thought a reverent friend to women.

Other subtle indications were scattered about like Path of Pollen jigsaw pieces.

The photo below was kept on the Path of Pollen side of the Sacred Trust website for years. The naming of this woman as a Path of Pollen Elder is taken from Andrew Gough’s 2008 interview with Simon and is one of his many infrastructures designed to give Path of Pollen veracity.⁴

In his Zoom interview Simon denies naming this photo as such. Although it’s still on Gough’s website and has been for sixteen years, has nobody thought to correct this misnomer?

The photo is actually taken from a book in Ashton Lodge and references a Victorian mourner telling the bees of a death.

But whatever Simon, or Naomi, say about this photo, this fakery came straight out of the gates at the very first workshop by crediting it as a ‘Bee Mistress’ from the Lyceum Lemniscus Lectorum. They knew it wasn't a Bee Mistress.

Below is the first offering, in 2007, of Arte Triptych Melissae. It’s interesting to note the names being used by Naomi & Kate at the incipience of this training. Kate remained Devorah whilst Naomi, at some point, switched from Fionulla to Vivienne. The adopted surnames are also curious. Tremenheere is place in Penzance near St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall and means Place of Long Stones. Shlockel, may or may not come from the Yiddish word Shlock, which means a piece of cheap merchandise. Although it’s more likely to be some kind of private joke, which Simon is fond of, or obscure reference that we’ll never know.

The black and white glyph shown will be very familiar to anyone who spent time at The Sacred Trust. A few of you will have bought white t-shirts bearing this honey bee logo from the shop in Ashton Lodge. It’s a symbol insidiously inserted into Path of Pollen lore.

Which in fact is symbol lifted from the O.TO. An occult order tied to the Freemasons and Rosicrucians, headed for a time by the ‘illustrious’ Aleister Crowley. Simon was an enthusiastic member of both orders and freely promiscuous with his syncretic embroidering between various hermetically sealed magical orders in creating the Path of Pollen. Nearly all of these orders are themselves not shy of incestuously overlapping and borrowing, with some spectacular fallouts between members. But digging out these roots, and the actual etymology of the Path of Pollen, is held for another day. First, women wanted to hear what the women teaching them had to say.

They wanted to hear from the women they’d trusted intimately and implicitly. The women they’d revealed their inner most landscapes to, devoted their secrets to, exposed their wounds, their shames, their spiritual longings to. This exchange of trust was crucial when dedicating yourself to the Path of Pollen work. Everything hung on women being able to trust each other and truth should be the mending balm from a tradition dedicated to healing. We thought the women teaching us would give us this truth.

Because, after all, if we’d been immersing ourselves in hard core spiritual work not held, not passed down and not from a lineage of Melissae women, what vast sea were we sailing on?

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* Another Buxton Russian Doll move. You can find the Bee Mistress’s plagiarised Knowledge Lecture here: https://www.context.org/iclib/ic16/reagan/ - from an interview with Harley Swiftdeer Reagan published in the Spring of 1987. Reagan is then outed as a fraud and a thief in this article from April 2014 by Friedrich Abel: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/sustainedreaction/harley-swiftdeer-reagan-s-theft-of-a-spiritual-lin-t6850.html - Like Buxton, Reagan lays out his special initiate status from boyhood and a fraudulent rigorous training with a distinguished spiritual elder. Reagan also set up his own Shaman School, pretending to hail from a sacred shamanic lineage. And like Reagan, Buxton also lifts a sacred rite from the Navajo people.

1. Taken from the course description of the Melissae Lyceum Lectorum on The Sacred Trust website. These courses are no longer available to view but can be look at retrospectively on the Internet Wayback Machine.

2. The Trembling Veil was another workshop offered on the Path of Pollen/Lyceum trainings. The Trembling Veil title is taken from W.B Yeats, prominent Golden Dawn Occultist, and his book The Trembling of the Veil. A term which Yeats quotes as taking from the French poet, literary critic and mystic, Stephane Mallarmé.

3. Excerpt from the Sacred Trust website Way of the Melissae workshop description.

4. You can find this interview here: https://andrewgough.co.uk/interviews_buxton/ This interview will be looked at more closely in a future essay.