The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters

Bee shamanism may be the most ancient and enigmatic branch of shamanism, and it is found throughout the world wherever the honeybee exists. In this authoritative ethnography and spiritual memoir, Simon Buxton--an elder of the Path of Pollen-- reveals the secret wisdom of this age-old tradition, until now known only to initiates. From Chapter One: Last Night, As I Was Sleeping Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt--marvellous error!-- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my past mistakes. --Antonio Machado No clear sounds. Just the distant white noise hum of blood in my ears, a signal of sorts that I am still alive, at least. Sometimes, the sense of a song. No vision and no images coming in from the outside world. Just me, alone here, small and frightened, lost in a snowstorm of white light against the black sky of my eyelids. I don’t know how long I have been here. I am nine years old and I have been in and out of this for days. Only years later will I come to know the name we give to this condition; encephalitis, a virus which attacks the brain. For now, the names and labels are meaningless. All I know is darkness. Nothing moves. And then, something. A face I think I recognise. An old man who smiles at me as I drift here in the dreamscape, crying the silent, fearful tears of a small boy standing at the edge of a vast drop into the abyss of death. “Nothing to be afraid of, little one,” he says. The words are spoken in German. He takes my hand. Together, we leap into the abyss. We never land, though. I open my eyes and look into his. They are no longer those of a human being. I am looking into eyes comprised of 26,000 magnificent hexagonal lenses, each one of them able to see deep into my soul. They are the eyes of a bee. And we are flying. Effortlessly, we arrive at the other side of the abyss and gently float to the earth. I look into those eyes again, and now they are human. They are eyes I recognise, the eyes of a friend. They are the eyes of Herr Professor. He looks at me and smiles. Kleine bubbe, ales gehst gut. Habst keine angst , he whispers. “Little one, all is well now. Nothing to be afraid of.” Two days after this “dream,” I am fully conscious and well enough to eat. A week later, I am out of bed and back to being a life-filled little boy. And so, I decide to visit my friend Herr Professor, after so long away from him. I walk through the woods which separate our two isolated houses, past the beehives he keeps in his garden, up to the dark wood door. Before I can even knock, the door is opened and Herr Professor stands smiling down at me. “Ah, little one,” he says. “How lovely to see you. There, I told you there was nothing to be afraid of.” I had met Herr Professor two years before this, when my family had moved from the north of England, to the forests of Vienna Austria. His was the only other house within a mile of our property, if you could call it a house. It was more a marriage between a wooden Tyrollean chalet a...