Much More Plagiarism and Revealed Influences

Click Below

  60+ New Instances of Plagiarism

PLEASE NOTE: as of May, 2024 several new instances of plagiarism have been discovered, primarily from Dion fortune, including 2 of the core concepts of Simon's "teaching"(female types and the 3 sisterhoods). The document above has not yet been undated to include all of it, though you can find some in the origins doc research under the aforementioned core concepts. We will update soon and mention it here. 

This link opens a new window for a downloadable PDF of the 60 plus instances of newly discovered plagiarism along with their sources, as well as the earlier found plagiarism (at the bottom). The first page is blank, so please scroll down, and excuse some formatting issues we had. Paragraphs are meant to be aligned next to each other, but sometimes they are a little askew.

 

 

The PDF is a table of the further, and more extensive plagiarism we have found in The Shamanic Way of the Bee.  We were hoping to continue our investigations into the origins of the Path of Pollen work but it quickly became apparent that the surfacing volume of plagiarised material needed to be urgently addressed.  Although having said that, some of the unearthed material is proving very useful in piecing together the genesis of our work.  We’d like to particularly draw your attention to Ithell Colquhoun’s beautiful book, The Living Stones: Cornwall in which Ithell makes several mentions of Atlantis and the Atlanteans.  And as she became a devotee of The Inner Light Society we are most interested in drawing the relevant parallels with the myths and practices of her work and the myths and practices of ours.  It’s a beautiful irony that she chose the magical name Splendidior Vitro - Clearer than Crystal. We shall be taking

her work most seriously.

 

Simon Buxton is also noted in Eric Ratcliffe's "Ithell Colquhoun, Pioneer, Surrealist, Artist, Occultist,Writer, and Poet" as lending her letters which he then owned.

Please also refer to "The Bee Master of Warrilow" https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63208/63208-h/63208-h.htm

(referenced in the Plagiarism table)

We are also intrigued by Dion Fortune, the head of the Inner Light Society, her one time husband Dr Thomas Penry Evans and the writings of Gareth Knight on these illuminating subjects. It’s been especially pertinent to read Gareth’s personal thanks to Simon Buxton in the Acknowledgments in his book Dion Fortune & The Inner Light ‘for generously giving his time and the results of his own painstaking research.’ Along with Gareth’s own glowing endorsement in the fly leaf of The Shamanic Way of the Bee.

The Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, myths of ancient Egypt and Arthurian Legends are also giving us good legwork. 

So, we continue on with the many other places to seek the truth we as looking for, as answers have been refused, washed over, ignored or outright lied about.

Apart from the PDF, this is *some* of what we know now (Bibliography to follow shortly)

From the video, we learned that none of the faculty at the sacred trust met any of the women mentioned in the book (for example, "Vivian"). However, we were all lead to believe that members of the faculty had trained extensively in person with them. It is stated in the video that a single faculty member had "telephonic" communication only. Now, women in the classes are being told a different history- that they were trained by Simon.

 

John Camillus Hone Travers was born in 1939 and attended Bryanston School in Dorset from 1952-1957.  So before Simon was born. Obviously they didn’t receive any kind of education together (as has been told to students previously). Camillus then went on to Oxford where he was sent down for repeated Illegal gambling and shortly after this he served six months in prison for drunk driving.  It was unfortunate he had a strained relationship with his adopted mother Pam, which was served by the fact she kept the knowledge of his adoption and the truth about his Irish twin brother from him.  Camillus, by all accounts, was an alcoholic for all his adult life. 

However this friendship meeting story was changed by Simon, telling us in his video interview that they met at The British Library.  Camillus would have needed a Reader’s Pass to be allowed to use the facilities there, but an email dated 19/9/23 from the Central Archive Department confirms that Camillus never held a Reader’s Pass. 

In the Video, Simon didn’t know that Camillus had three very young children exactly at the time he purports to have been in London.  Kitty born in 1977, Cicley born in 1979 and Bruno born in 1985.  Or that Pamela Travers , someone he was allegedly close to and in regular contact with as his mentor, was a grandmother.  Fleetingly in the video interview Simon also mentions sadly that Camillus died young, in the 90’s.  Camillus died in 2011 at the age of 71.

Which brings me to the Navajo initiation ceremony that is almost identical to Simon’s own supposed initiation in Chapter 7 - Vitamin Pan (see previous entries for details on this). {In the video} He seemed surprised to hear of the similarities and told us he knows little about the Navajo.  This is curious to us as Pam Travers herself spent two summers with the Navajo people, learning their ways and being a part of their community.  They even bestowed a magical name on her.  So it is strange that during all of their tea drinking and talking of spiritual matters, she never spoke of it. Simon taught a group of students the Navajo Walk in his classes. A specific way of walking across the land exactly in each other’s footsteps so as to cover great ground with the least amount of energy…

We also contacted the publishers of TSWOTB, Inner Traditions & Bear Company, asking if they knew about the plagiarism and how they were going to deal with it in the upcoming 20th edition.  We received an email back from Kelly Bowen dated 6/9/23 telling us there was nothing in the files about plagiarism and there wasn’t, or had ever been, any plans for said 20th anniversary edition. 

Also floating around in the mouth to ear telling was that Simon had never meant his manuscript for publication, something he reiterates in the video interview,  and only showed it Ken Eagle Feather - now known as Ken Smith - for him to read and see what he thought.  Ken then showed the manuscript to his publisher, Inner Traditions, who wanted to publish it.  We’ve had several email correspondence with Ken, but the pertinent one is dated 1/9/23 where he says he cannot even remember Simon sending him ’his bee manuscript’ and he didn’t give it to Inner Traditions.  He told us they only shared a publisher.  But we do want to acknowledge Ken did write an endorsement of TSWOTB - even though he can’t remember doing so. 

And a friend of Ken, Jim Peters also emailed us to verify the Simon in brackets in his online notes of his Workshop with Merilyn Tunneshede https://uazu.net/notes/merilyn.html dated 1999 in Devon, is Simon Buxton.  Seemingly learning Fire Sipping. 

There is also the incidence of the photograph on The Sacred Trust Website, which is the same one Andrew Gough has posted in his interview with Simon, and which is also used on the first publicity flyer for The Way of the Melissae (We also have photos of this) - it’s the black and white photograph of a woman in a black dress tending to skep and is titled ‘Elder of the Path of Pollen.’  But is actually a photo taken from a book about beekeeping. You can see why this is misleading. Mr. Gough has been informed of this and is intending to change the caption.

 

 

 

 

A lawyer was sent to threaten and intimidate us into halting the sharing of Simon’s video interview - which we absolutely and most clearly had permission to share. We did stop sharing it, however.  The Lawyers behaviour was unprofessional in the extreme and calling women ‘dumb’ because they believed Simon’s book to be true is a new level of insulting. Eventially the reasons for not wanting the video shared changed into something else entirely, but the lawyers only threatened reputations and vague legal actions, pressuring us to say that we didn't have permission, which we did, in email. Stateing that it was a matter of *magical* or esoteric privacy. We are not in the business of taking legal action over this, but are apalled by this behavior.

 

There are interviews with Simon in The Golden Hoop - Issue 45 from 2004, The Andrew Gough interview  https://andrewgough.co.uk/interviews_buxton/. from 2008, a further one in Hilary S. Webb’s book Travelling Between Worlds: Interviews with Contemporary Shamans and Simon’s essay in Shamanism In The New Millennium in which all of these pieces Simon goes into acute detail about his various initiations with Bridge on The Path of Pollen.The book is marketed as non-fiction, and we have been told over and over that it's real. Why would we think otherwise. 

Recently, the language on the Sacred Trust website has changed. The word "Tradition" was chaned to "Conclave".

Lastly we feel it important to deal with several recurring themes coming up around the ‘work works’ excuse, people’s privacy, human error and the work being separate from the book.  To suggest that we should take the work at face value because of its clear potency and beauty is infantilising and doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of patronising.  These are practices women are taking into their very bodies and they deserve to know where they are from.  Not least because a lot of us have spend thousands of pounds and a great deal of time learning them.  We would like to be able to look a client or a student dead in the eye and know that we are in truth and in integrity, and as far as we are able, to tell them where the healing methodologies they are about to undergo are from.  

 

Yes, everyone has a right to privacy but not when deep initiatory experiences have been falsified, lived spiritual knowledge and lineages and shamanic traditions sold to participants as real when in fact they are bedded in endemic and systematic deceptions.  This is beyond human error.

And so many women not only come to the work through the book, the book is the only written account and ‘authoritative ethnographic spiritual memoir’ of the Path of Pollen work.  The Sisters Six are in it, the Nektars are in it, the Types are in it and it’s awash with Knowledge Lectures (often plagiarised from elsewhere).  What kind of mental gymnastics are women being asked to do to cognitively displace one from the other? 

This has affected and is affecting so many women.   And we are not talking ‘a handful of women’ but the many hives of women who have passed into this work.  And who will yet pass through it. 

 

As well, as you can see, much of the plagiarism is from women writers, as well as indigenous sources. We want no part in this kind of appropriation and patriarchy.

 

That is why we are freely sharing the information we hold right now and the research still yet to come, with all woman in our community, with an incoming bibliography.