Transcript from Jules Evans Interview

In September Jules Evans approached me asking for an interview.

His email wrote:

“These are the questions Id love to ask you, maybe you could reply by email? 

- how do you feel about the plagiarisms by Simon and his and Naomi’s apparent concoction of the whole alleged-tradition? 

- how did you feel about Shift Network removing your course? 

- how do you feel about ‘European bee shamanism’ now? As in, do you still think it’s real?”

I feel things were not represented clearly or truthfully, especially my experience with the Shift Network. I’ve included my relevant responses that were sent over voice recordings:

Introduction:

My name is Ariella Daly. I am a beekeeper. I teach natural beekeeping. I'm currently getting a Master Beekeeping Certificate from Cornell. I've been beekeeping since 2010 and I teach a mixture of beekeeping work, dream work, and what I now call bee animism, because I no longer believe bee shamanism is real. Bee shamanism in the sense of people working with bees in a shamanic way, I do believe is real, but as far as a European bee shamanism, a folk tradition with roots that date back to ancient Greece? I absolutely do not believe that is real.

In 2010 I came across this work and I traveled to England because I had a degree in anthropology, and I had spent time in Ireland studying Arthurian fiction and Irish mythology and culture. I have had a very long standing relationship with folk traditions and folk cultures. I have a background in studying anthropology; studying folklore. My main interest is: where do pre-Christian traditions span time, and show up, even in the Modern era? Such as the practice of telling the bees which is not a bee shamanism thing, it's a folk tradition. So that's my area of interest. And then, of course, ancient cultures.

I've spent a lot of time studying pre-Christian traditions in relationship to women and women's traditions and the sacred feminine.

Now I went to to England because of Simon's book. Because when I read Simon's book, I was so overcome with a sense of familiarity and profound just relief that, oh, my god, something survived. I can't believe something survived. That was my feeling. And I was not the only one. Over the years, American women in particular went to England to study at the Sacred Trust, because there was this feeling of, here I am a settler on unceded land in the United States, feeling like I want to connect to roots. And here's something that actually survived and has roots.

The history:

The work over there - I met Simon once in person, very briefly - all the work was with women, and Naomi. Naomi and Kate. They were very dedicated, in particular to empowering women and the bringing forward the feminine principle in all things. One of the main teachings that I still work with today is this idea of direct revelation, meaning having a direct relationship with spirit, not having an intermediary: going directly to the source. That's why you have things like shamanic journeys. A version of a shamanic journey is a figure eight walk, and that is inspired by the bees. Now we know that that walk is not, in fact, something that came down from the bee tradition, but if you research the figure eight - eight in relationship to spiritual traditions - you find it all over the place, and of course, it's how the bees communicate. So in terms of, does something like the infinity symbol still have meaning to me? Absolutely. Do I think that it came from a long standing tradition? No.

And so there's this, this— I can mostly speak for my American sisters: we went there, in part because of this book, and in part because this work was so deeply empowering. Ultimately, it was womb shamanism. It was about the power of deeply listening to the body, of reclamation of the womb as a center for wisdom and knowing. And I continue to study that.

In 2015 someone told me that Simon made it all up. I thought “Oh, my God”, that actually just completely devastated me. So I went to Naomi and let her know. “Hey, this happened. I want to know the actual story, the actual origins of this work.” And as far as she knew, it was absolutely true, but she sent me to Simon to have a conversation with him. We had a zoom call, and we talked about the tradition. And he told me all of these things about his experience with these women, his experience with Bridge, the supposed elder that we now know never existed. And these were details. Up until this point in my life, I had not encountered a pathological liar, so I didn't have the radar to pick up on it. I was just like, “oh, this has got to be true, because he's talking about, literally, chopping wood and some really mundane things.” These were very detailed personal stories that weren't in the book, and that answered it for me. In my mind, no one could lie to my face with detailed stories about their experience. It just didn't make any sense. And so, of course, I believed him.

The Shift Network:

When it [the extensive plagiarism] first came out, the way it was presented was that anybody teaching, any women associated with this work are complicit by nature. That was also very harmful to a lot of people. And at that point, the staff had no idea. The women teaching this work had no idea there was that much plagiarism. So when it came out, I went to the Shift Network. They had already approached me because they wanted to rebrand the course I had taught (European bee shamanism) and and I actually saw this- that we're going to reteach the course - as “this is actually interesting. this happening while this plagiarism [discovery] is happening, because we we need to talk. We need to talk about what I teach.” I let them know about what was going on. They decided to take all references to Simon out of my course and out of the promo.

I was working with one of the PR people to to really try and…. they/we went back and forth about an email to send out to students, how to say it, what to say. And this was all as this [the plagiarism/lies] was coming out and unfolding. I was emailing my boss. I was emailing all these different people involved. I was reaching out to saying, “Hey, this is a red flag. We need to talk about this, etc, etc.” Then the staff from the Sacred Trust finally had a meeting, probably about a month later, maybe three weeks later. I can't remember the exact dates, but I do remember that on november 5, 2023 they [The Sacred Trust female faculty] had a meeting with Simon, and he admitted that these (the book/his story) were things that happened in “non ordinary reality”. So we found out that Bridge wasn't real and that these women [who] supposedly taught him in secret, weren't real.

Part of the problem with all of this is that Naomi had conversations with a woman over the phone named Vivian, who had given her "transmissions", and so now she had no idea what was real, and if this woman was complicit in something, who this woman was, etc. She had been given a last name, but supposedly her first name was a code name, so Naomi still doesn't know who it was that she was having conversations with, [this woman] who was supposedly an elder of this tradition.

As this was coming out, I was updating my students with things that felt true, like “what we know now is that there is plagiarism”. “What we know now is that Simon made up a large portion of this work”. “What we know now is that there's an amalgamation of various traditions in Simon's work”. What I wasn't doing was a blow by blow of every little thing that Simon said or didn't do. I wasn't picking it apart. During that time I had many meetings with concerned students to talk about what I knew, and what was going on. I had one student in particular start to threaten me, threaten litigation that I wasn't giving every last detail about Simon. I wasn't, for instance, talking about how there's a potential that there is a person named bid Bon bot, who was part of the Golden Dawn who might have been who Bridge was. These were details that were so strange and murky that it was too…. I wanted to just have very specific like, “this is what we know. This is what's still being asked. This is what I don't know.”

I went to the Shift Network once I found out that Simon had made things up, and I offered to step down, offered to stop teaching at the Shift Network. And they said, “No, no, everything's fine. It's no big deal. It's not a big deal for us. We love your teachings.” They wanted to proceed with the course. I met with them to prepare the next course, and out the gate, they said, Okay, we're going to call this European bee shamanism. And I said, "Absolutely not. I cannot teach a course on European Bee shamanism anymore: we know that it's not real." And I asked them to actually, go back to the drawing board with each other and discuss, because apparently the departments weren't talking to each other. I never heard from my boss about me offering to step down. I never heard from my boss about all of my concerns. I just heard from everyone else that it was totally fine, no big deal. Then a group of students threatened litigation against the Shift Network if they didn't take my courses down and basically get rid of me. And so it was literally one day, I was telling them I couldn't teach a course on Bee Shamanism. And they said it's no big deal. And I said "it is a big deal". And the next day they let me go. We've had a lot of discussions since then, because I was very, very frustrated that they didn't take me seriously about how important it was that this was handled ethically around the veracity of bee shamanism. They have since apologized to me. They have actually invited me to come back and teach. They really like my teaching, but because that was all handled so messily, I have not gone back to teach with them, because ethics are really important to me.

I feel like it was the right move to take my courses down. Like I said, I had offered to take them down, but we were also in the process of redoing a course. So I saw it as an opportunity to no longer teach it as bee shamanism and work with different principles around the bees. So yeah, I think it was the right move. I think the way it was done was was handled very poorly.

HOW DID IT AFFECT ME:

I lost more than a third of my yearly income as single mom. There are three things that I think are truly awful about the situation. One is obviously Simon and his lies. It's so out of this world, in my experience. I couldn't fathom that somebody could lie for that long, to that degree. Two, the way women who had studied in this work treated each other, especially around what people were experiencing and what people believed when it was still being discovered whether or not it was real. The way women treated each other was was pretty awful. The way some people treated the female staff from the Sacred Trust, who were also floundering trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I think that was really sad because, you know, we, we'd spent so much time together, learning how to be cohesive and in a hive, and I think for a lot of people, it sort of turned a lot of people off from spirituality in general. Those are two of the most terrible things. But the third thing that I think is truly awful is that this work, the revelation of this not being real, really created a crisis of faith for many people who had come to this work, including myself, with this belief that there was an actual folk tradition behind it, and that something had survived, something of the Sacred Feminine had survived all the decimation, all of the devastation of women's traditions over the centuries, and that it had survived by hiding in plain sight through bees, beekeeping and women's traditions like weaving. That was really heartbreaking.

Women like me also lost significant income and livelihoods. It's one thing for Simon to lose his livelihood based on his lies, but entirely a different thing for women who have spent 1000s of dollars. I flew to the UK 11 times. I spent 1000s of dollars trying to learn more about a folk tradition that was based in women's spirituality. I based a lot of my business off of having studied so long and so diligently that I felt…. I had taken literally a three year training so that I could teach this work and continue this work forward. One thing that I was doing that no one else was doing is combining this work with actual beekeeping. And I think that, at this point, is now a big red flag: Why wasn't that happening? It was a bee tradition. Why weren't we learning about bees in that way?

But I found a beautiful synthesis of this work in the bees, and actually really started to understand where a lot of the practices were related to bees and in these beautiful ways. Since then, I have just been really honest with my students. I was in the middle of teaching classes when this all took place, so I offered refunds to everybody. I had very candid and honest conversations during my courses with people, and the response that I have gotten has been, please don't stop teaching this. I've had to say I cannot teach it as a lineage anymore. I have had people begging me to keep teaching it, feeling very sad that they can't go back to the UK and keep learning it, feeling like they were in the middle of training, and they just don't care about whether it's true or not, because the practices were so powerful. So that has been a really interesting thing to navigate. People asking me to keep going, and a lot of people just saying “We don't care. These practices are beautiful. It doesn't matter where they came from.”

It matters to me. But I just want to say that that has been the majority of response from my students. I lost very few students in the process. I was very honest with people. I was very candid. I had one student ask for a refund. So it's just something to be aware of, because perhaps there are other people that are painting a different picture, but when it all comes down to it, the income that I lost was with the Shift Network, and also because I had to take time and pause and try and figure out, what can I teach? How can I move forward with my work?

Do I believe Bee shamanism is real?

No, I don't. What I do believe is that there are threads and shards of women's spirituality out there that are throughlines, that are that are true, that are universal truths, like the connections between life, women's work and weaving, which was a big part of the work we did. I think that's true. Working with the intuition as part of the sacred feminine principle, and working with oracular practices, all of that doesn't feel like it belongs to bee shamanism... and and you can find it in the historical record.

I do think some of the practices still have tremendous value, and I still use them to this day in my personal spiritual work, because they were taught as avenues towards direct relationship with the with the bees, with spirit guides, with ancestors, with the body and I will not let a man's fallacy and lies take away my sovereign relationship to my physical body as a vessel for spiritual, physical, and emotional truth.

My takeaway from all of this has been to continue to seek spiritual and emotional and inner truth through connection to the land, to the body, and to the more than human world. That is what I've been doing since I was 15, and what I continue to do. The tragedy for me is that something that I thought was precious and had been preserved did not, in fact, survive, and it just brings up that much more grief around the systematic oppression of women's spirituality in Europe over the centuries.

The harm beyond the lies:

I also want to let you know that even though we haven't spoken this experience, what happened was fairly traumatizing and harmful. We lost the thread. It could have been really about what this one man did, but instead, women really went after other women, myself included, and it was done in such an aggressive and painful and harmful way that even talking about it is scary for me, because I have been directly threatened. My livelihood has been threatened. My reputation has been threatened, which isn't as important as being able to put food on the table for my daughter. As a single mother who built her career around this, it's pretty intense.

There's been a lot of repair work. I'm interested in repair. After trauma comes repair work, and that's what we have to do. Because, you know, this is not the first time a white man has been in a place of power and has deceived others. And while there may not have been the typical sex scandals or anything like that - there was so much beauty in the work and we don't want to lose the beauty of women coming together In support of women's empowerment, women's intuition, women's embodiment. We don't want to lose that at the hands of another patriarchal figure who never even taught us. We never sat in the room with him, at least I never did. He never taught the women's work. And so it's a very vulnerable thing to even interview about it or talk about, because those of us who were teaching this work were really aggressively maligned. And that can be very, very painful to experience, especially with people who you trusted. And so for me, that's my caution in speaking to you, is that this doesn't need to be sensationalized any more than it already has been. This is about a man who plagiarized. A man who created an amalgamation and called it a tradition and then taught it to people who believed it to be real and carried it forward as a tradition. I lost some of my faith. I lost income, for sure, but I gained so much more from working with these women to the degree that I was able to move forward in my life after a devastating miscarriage, through the healing work I did and the empowerment and the embodiment work I did, I was able to move forward and have the child that I have always wanted on my own.

Final Note (not part of the transcript): I think the one thing that hasn’t been explicitly said, is how awful it feels to have passed something on to students as a teacher that I believed was real, and turned out to be made up. That’s certainly something to contend with, even if I didn’t know it wasn’t real at the time.

If you want to learn more about this whole thing you can read my article “What is Bee Shamanism”