In 2022, I was asked to write a blog post about my "lovely bee stuff" for a lady who is an expert on Mary Magdalene and her connections to the Knight's Templars.

I misconstrued the brief.

She had expected a peice about ways of using honey and bee products for healing. I wrote about bee priestesses called Melissae; how the Melissae of Glastonbury are associated with Mary Magdalene and how Roslyn Chapel seems to be associated with bees. I referred to some of my former research in Merting The Melissae which took the article to the Melissae of Aphrodite of Eryx in Sicily. These Melissae were initiators of sacred sex.

Gretchen Cornwall is a featured expert on the Mysteries of Oak Island. She requested to have a meeting with me. She asked if this work had been published before. When I said it hadn't, she looked concerned and a little pensive. Explaining that this was not at all what she had thought I was going to write, she apologised that, she did not feel the research about the sex rites. was appropriate for her readers. Disappointed at the waste of a week's work, I'd expected her to pull it. But actually, she said something different. She asked if she could publish an edited form on her blog, but then share the original with some people she knew. I was intrigued, and agreed, not really knowing how things would continue.

Papers passed from hand to hand, and priestesses from all over the world started messaging me to find out more about my work. They were fascinated to know more about the bees/ Eventually it was proposed to me that I might be interested in becoming a member of an organisation called the Fellowship of Isis as a way to support my research into the historical story of the bee as a manifestation of the goddess, and repopulating the planet with bees.

I'd never heard of it.

The Fellowship of Isis is a multi-faith organisation dedicated to honoring the Goddess in Her many forms. Founded at Huntington (Clonegal) Castle in Ireland in 1976, founders Olivia Robertson, Lawrence Robertson (her brother) and Pamela Durdin-Robertson (his wife), created the multi-religious, multi-racial, and multi-cultural organisation that is dedicated to honoring the religion of the Goddess in every religion and pantheon. (I should stress that Gods are also venerated.)

It is not a secret orgnaisation, neither are there any vows. Merely a framework of work around the Goddess.

To me, religion and spirituality is a sacred thing. It is something I respect more about a person than anything else. It tells me huge amounts about how they see the world, their beliefs and viewpoints, and how they turn up in thee world. So, to be offered such an opportunity felt no small thing. I wanted to sit with the decion for a while and consider the commitment.

I spent a lot of time considering what it would mean to be part of this. What the Fellowship of Isis offered to me was clear, but what did I have to offer it? And the answer to that was nothing. I had knowledge, but nothing that could be placed in service to the altar of this work.

Anso, it was time to take the question to the bees. "Why is this part of the plan and how can I be of service?"

Well, there are three things you should know about bees (actually, there are ten thousand, but I'll be brief...)

First, they work quickly So, so, fast. When they settle into a new home, give them a week and they'll create a wax cathedral!

They dream big.

They are ambitious and theyreally know how to use resources available.

Another thing is that they will not be confined. Some colonies are worse than others for this, but if they don't fancy a door you made them, they'll make another, Close that up, they'll make another, And another. Until the hive bears no resemblance to the one you planned. It's a whole new concept of their imagination. (We had one colony which we named Ishtar, but eventually they became known as the maddo's. They were just a law unto themselves when it came to entries. They absolutely refused to be humanly managed. I loved that! That'll teach me to invoke war goddesses!)

Then thirdly, bee shamanism is often about bee lines, Or I find it is, for me anyway. I might think the route from A -B is simple. Or moreso that is perhaps impossible. Or sometimes I don't know B exists.

Bee lines are fast. Things happen so swiftly,you have no realisation that that is raining jigsaw peice on your head, but let them do it for longe enough and you'll have a picture that is so different from anything you could have imagined. Getting from A-B tends to have routes through places you never knew existed, sometimes in the human world, sometimes in soil or wax....so many unexpected moments.

One thing that anyone who lives close enough to me will attest to, is I do always look like I have been dragged through a hedge backwards.

I haven't of course, I've been following a bee line from A - B... There just happened to be branches and leaves in the way!

But follow the bees. Always follow the bees, because the girls always know, y'know!

The way that a bee moves through the hive is called the bee space. (It is the size of just one bee.)

The Bee Space I was meant to be inhabiting was opening up to me.

En route to this bee space of the Aromatic Mystery School, I was encouraged to sit a while with the plant spirits, to work with trees, water and nymphs, to learn how to honour nature spirits and and nymphs. This was done with help (in this world) from Frances Bartlett and Ginger Andro, and in the hidden realms, with Empedo, a bee nymph, priestess of the Cretan goddess Britomartis, and naiad of the Acropolis spring Klepsydra. Empedo showed me how to use scented oils to give as offerengs to elementals and spirits of place, in the ways it was done two and three thousand years ago.

At last I had found the place where oils and the divine femine intersect.

This quest for balance of divinity, to raise the vibration of the divine feminine, to bring it back into equal balance to the divine masculine (and not to replace or oppress that) has become my work.

To be in service to the right brained thinking of the aromatherapy community to add balance to those important work being done focussed on logic and science.

To support people in their quest to illuminate parts of their psyche, who sense things unseen, but don't know how to access, control or direct that. To use it to introduce the light. To serve the womanly priesthoods of antiquity, and those priestesses who are reappearing with the wisdom ray's resurrection.

And finally, this sacred covenant made with the bees and The Fellowship of Isis meant that I needed to leave the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece for a while and immerse myself in the Mysteries of Isis.

From that, and my work with myrrh, I was introduced, by Hygeia, (Greek goddess of ritual and preventative medicine,) to a force more terrifying than I could ever imagine, Sekhmet, destructive lion Goddess of war, plagues, disease, and medicine, and to the beautiful cow goddess Hathor.

It is Sekhmet who dreamed the Aromatic Mystery School into beeing.

Becoming a Fellowship of Isis member was the beginning of a dream coming true, but oddly, a dream I never know I had had. It has been one of my most precious accolades and hope that, in the future, I maybe able to build this school into something fit to be one of their lyceums.