Pulling The Thread Part Two: Brewing
'There is a life behind the personality that uses personalities as mask. There are times when life puts off that mask and deep answers unto deep.' Dion Fortune, The Goat-Foot God.
Indisputably Simon Buxton is a gifted storyteller. As a long serving shamanic teacher his knowledge is broad and deep with an often commented upon charismatic personality to deliver it. Particularly able to hold a room in thrall with his many magical experiences, personal revelations and shamanic miracle anecdotes, students look to him as a magical guide and professional elder. They want to please him and they absolutely believe him. Anyone reading this with first hand experience of Simon as a teacher will feel the resonating command of holding yourself to The Gold Standard. And of wanting to do just that.
Intertwined within Simon’s coterminously founded roles of teacher/storyteller there’s a solid vein of personal myth making wedged alongside. I am using the term myth partly in its function as a model of tapping into our ancestral consciousness but also as a reach into our imagination, the imagination being the diamond drill with which we mine for other world information. So these parts of our highly connected selves, elusive to the mundane mind, need myth as nourishment as we are drawn into the metaphorical offerings of higher powers and asked to learn from the planes of the soul. This is a fundamental aspect of any shamanic education and opens up the imagination as the first point of contact with Spirit.
Invariably then, the myth of Simon as a specifically chosen and rigorously initiated emissary of an ancient feminine shamanic tradition, held firm sway even when the cracks were starting to show. Not least because, for a lot of woman training on that path, it was unthinkable that the mythical landscapes they were creating within themselves came from a fictional ancient lineage. We were all explicitly admonished into walking in the footsteps of those ‘who had gone before us’ as disciplined funambulists within the Path of Pollen.
So to simultaneously throw up and piece together this jigsaw of pretence, it’s important we pull one or two stands out from Simon’s Path of Pollen Plagiarism Pensieve and see where his arse covering, by myth making, begins.
To begin with Simon explained the use of the Travers' excerpts as accidental because of his photographic memory. This skill seemingly backed up by his ability to produce word for word transcriptions of the Knowledge Lectures delivered to him by Bridge as 'This eidetic approach was a talent forced from me out of necessity.'1
But this presents a conundrum within itself. Using the Travers passages as an example of Simon having this photographic memory means, by dint of this talent, he would know he's pouring her words into Bridge's mouth or using them as his own recollections. The Travers’ passages are used to flesh out the fabric of Bridge’s spoken wisdom along with Simon's own boyhood memories. His photographic memory would mean he knows where he’s getting these snapshots from. He would recognise his memories and experiences as his own and not regurgitated passages from reading What the Bee Knows. Also it's no common feat to be able to supply, at will, whole paragraphs word for word, and subsequent demands for displays of this as a party trick are dangerously inevitable. This is before we get to the heat of teaching a room full of people whose expectations of your memory will be dauntingly high.
Concocting a story as a 'homage' to Travers, Simon is on much safer ground because at least he can make it plausible with a tale of not only how she was his mentor but he's also able to tinge it with synchronistic glamour. A validatory brew irresistible to Simon's status as a spiritually selected initiate and one which creates a starry eyed sensation in the listener.
There are two different versions peddled by Simon of how he came to meet Travers. Both using her son Camillus. The earlier one being that Simon met Camillus Travers at either school or college where they became friends. The second, and more recent version, was changed to meeting Camillus at The British Library. Because of the importance of connection and context it's necessary to get a short overview of Camillus as a son and as a person.
Camillus was sent down from Oxford for the repeated offence of illegal gambling. In his early twenties he spent a short time in prison for drunk driving when already under a ban. By his later teens he was pretty entrenched in a drinking career and alcohol was the demon driving much of his life. It’s been mooted that his alcoholism was, in no small part, due to Travers keeping from him the truth of his adoption by her as a baby and that he was one of a twin. Up until he was seventeen he believed Travers to be his biological mother and his father a deceased wealthy sugar magnate.
This lie held until his twin, Anthony, turned up at their Chelsea home demanding to see his brother. Travers, faint with shock, tried to get rid of him but a scene ensued and Anthony only left when he was threatened with the police. Impossible now to keep the truth from her son, Camillus ran from the house and found Anthony in a nearby pub. They spent the next three days drinking together. A difficult on/off sibling relationship ensued with life-long resentments on both parts of the brothers. From Anthony for what he saw as the privileged and wealthy life Camillus enjoyed. And from Camillus because he saw Anthony as being part of an interesting and artistic blood family he was denied love and connection from. Camillus essentially felt he didn't know who he was or where he truly belonged.
It's critical to note that Camillus's grandfather was Joseph Hone, the first biographer of the poet W.B Yeats, poster boy for The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and a pertinent figure in the coming intertextuality of occult friendship and practice. Travers, in her twenties, was generously mentored by the Irish poet and mystic A.E Russell, sometime fractious friend and Golden Dawn comrade of Yeats. And it's a mythologised tale that she once turned up on Yeats’ doorstep with Rowan branches from the island of Innisfree as a gift for him, which got her through his front door.
Travers held a deep romantic love for Ireland and the Irish, so her adoption of Camillus from this country, and with his connections and heritage, was strategic and purposeful. She also saw his family connections as auspicious and ones which suited the image she projected of herself. And the reason she didn't also adopt Anthony, although she as begged to keep the twins together, was because her astrologer told her not to.
From the point of discovering his adoption and secret family, Camillus felt isolated from what he viewed as his controlling and pretentious mother and he never let Travers off the hook for this unforgivable deception. In her turn, so concerned was she with Camillus' drinking that Travers left the greater portion of her wealth to her grandchildren, leaving her son a fixed modest stipend on which to live. Even though Travers ensured Camillus would've wanted for nothing materially, the mother-son relationship had been pointedly strained since his late teens. The obvious question now being how likely Camillus would've been to take a young man home to meet the mother he struggled to love?
But let's go back a few steps to the facts at hand. It's a bold assertion of a friendship made at either school or college considering the barest of research shows Camillus to be twenty one years older than Simon and deeper research shows they went to different schools, even if a slight connection could be claimed from that. Camillus attended the forward thinking private school Bryanston in Dorset, which Simon did not, and Camillus finished his education there three years after Simon was born. Not forgetting his expulsion from Oxford.
So what of the library story? Well a couple of email exchanges with The British Library, and The British Museum where records before the nineties are kept, show that Camillus never held a Reader's Pass, something he would've needed to access the building, material and a reading room. So he wasn’t at The British Library as a regular reader.
But Simon fleshes this lie out to not only be believable but also charming and, again, synchronistic. Another date with his destiny. There's the 'beautiful building' of The British Museum, the organic meeting over a cup of coffee with 'this guy who was just a little older than me.'2 The ensuing chat about Simon's interest in Laurens van der Post and how Camillus extended an invite to Simon to meet his 'mom' because she knew van der Post. Simon is staggered and delighted by this information. I mean who wouldn't want to meet a famous writer who knows a famous writer you love. But there's an irony at play here worth a sideways glance.
Laurens van der Post was discovered as an inveterate liar who blurred many lines between the facts and fiction of his life. Not least, fabricating a military career which bigs him up heroically, inventing himself as an expert Bushman and hiding fathering a child with a fourteen year old ballet dancer he was charged with escorting to Britain. It's tempting at this point to ask 'What is it with these men and their fantasies about themselves?' But Travers did the same. She peddled false versions of herself and especially her father which caused all kinds of confusion when it came to her obituaries. At various turns Travers claimed her father was a successful sugar planter (remember she drags this character out as the dead father to Camillus), that her grandfather had been the 'premier of Queensland' and 'who was also the founder of one of Australia's biggest companies, Colonial Sugar refining.'3
She also told people her father was from a prestigious old Irish family (there’s her colonising romanticism again) and part of the landed gentry. All painting a far better picture than her dad being the 'provincial pen pusher in the back of a provincial bank' he was. Hiding the fact he was born in the very not-very-glamorous Deptford in South East London, about a mile away from where I’m writing this.
So we have Simon interested in a writer who made himself up, friends with another writer who made herself up, whilst Simon is making this all up. It's so deliciously meta.
But let’s stay with this Matryoshka Doll meeting story nesting within a story. Simon trots off with Camillus to meet the notoriously difficult and extremely private Travers and names her house as being on off the King’s Road ‘Sinclair Road.' This is a mistake as Sinclair Road lies in the West Kensington/ Hammer-smith area of London. And although not a million miles away from Chelsea, it's a far way off the Shawfield Street where Travers actually lived. Interestingly, the Sinclair Road Simon mentions is where Dr. Theodore Moriarty, one time teacher of Dion Fortune, High Priestess and leading Occult figure of The Fraternity of the Inner Light Society (now the Society of the Inner Light) and a woman Simon has 'painstakingly' researched, set up a co-Masonic Lodge. And we also know Simon was involved with the Masons. I could be reaching for Freudian slips here but it's a coincidence worth noting.
What also gives pause in this story is that Simon was unaware, when asked, that Camillus would've been a father, and therefore Travers a grandmother, to three young children at this time - we're talking latish seventies to the mid-eighties. Kate Travers born 1977, Cicely Jane Travers born 1979 and Bruno Henry Travers born 1985. So, no mention of Camillus being a busy father or Travers a doting grandmother. No photos adorning her sitting room and no talk of them coming to visit. Three young children are not easy things to hide. There's only Simon receiving his spiritual inheritance from her as a mentor and a right to use her work.
Simon simultaneously gives himself away and pursues our compassion in this over wrung tale by talking of his grief at the deaths of Travers and Camillus. He’s becomes visibly emotional near the end of the video interview at Travers dying in the late nineties telling us ‘it was completely flooring for me…then Cam died as well, which was, which was very difficult. He was young, and umm, so like that whole connection just kind of fla-falap…’(sic). Not even Simon’s continuous use of ‘Cam’ as a cipher for a close friend covers this deception. He doesn't know that Camillus died in 2011 and at the age of seventy one. Not young and not anywhere dated near the late nineties. Yet surely such a close friendship would have engendered a correspondence, not least a sending of his Travers inspired homage and book to his old friend. And not a mention of P L Travers, this woman who gave so much of her time and wisdom, in the acknowledgements of The Shamanic Way of the Bee? And this is before we follow the White Rabbit down the hole to find Bridge…who Travers is responsible for introducing Simon to.4
At the time of Travers’ death Simon wouldn’t have seen her for around a decade as he left London in 1986, the purported time of his incipient initiation into the Path of Pollen. And so when he tells us that ‘that part of my life just kind of collapsed’ after these two deaths, it’s a smoke screen born of panic and an endeavour to have us believe he truly had these relationships. This is the entrenched hold a myth making personality surreptitiously wants to exert. The fabulousness of Simon touching the hem of holy contact, of being privy to the inner world of a famous writer and being close with her family, sinks down to establish what appears as unquestionable foundations. Not least because there’s a spiritual autobiography to back it all up and the straight face of a man authorised by his divine qualifications.
People paying money for his workshops and trainings at The Sacred Trust bought this lie for too long, not least because the faculty teaching his work also maintained his fiction. Whether they personally believed him or not. And no one ever checked. That’s quite a hold to have over students and colleagues.
But the Travers facade is only one part of this fictional background story. One side of an assembled myth necessary to Simon’s view of himself and for the myth to serve as personal protection. A myth to keep the status quo. A myth served up to keep our own imaginations in service to how Simon needs to be seen. It’s a psychically sticky combination. But like all inveterate liars addicted to overblown story telling in an effort to look authentic, Simon shores up the above story with other tales of fictional contradictions hoping to glue the Path of Pollen together. This is where we are going next.
From the chapter titled ‘The Gate Of Transition’ - an appellation directly lifted from Tickner Edwardes’ The Bee Master of Warrilow. Plagiarised parts from that book will be discussed later.
From Simon’s video interview with Chelsy Arber and Judith Bogner dated 8th September 2023. All further quotes of Simon’s speech is taken from this conversation.
Out of the Sky She Came: The Life of PL Travers the Creator of Mary Poppins by Valerie Lawson, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013.
By his own admission Simon tells us Travers sent him to a certain village to find Bridge, a man who ‘knows more about bees’ than anyone she’d ever met. The character of Bridge certainly requires and deserves a whole essay to himself.