The Lotus Priest

For twelve years, I wanted nothing to do with plant medicine.

My path was healing, aromatherapy, energy work, Reiki, Ayurveda studied in India, yoga certified three times, breath, sound, intuitive work. I sat with clients one to one for years. Through the body, out of the mind, towards the light of the soul. That was the whole of my life.

“And I judged the people who did ceremony. They are lost, I thought. They need practice.”

I believed plants kept people earthbound, a shortcut to nowhere. I had a decade of practice and a well-argued reason to keep them at arm's length.

Egypt never called me either. No childhood fascination, no sense of having been there before. I need to be honest about that, because it's the part that makes the rest true.

Then, in Bali in 2021, I was watching a documentary before sleep. It was about a priestess, the Blue Lotus, and the temple rituals.

“Something ancient woke up in me.”

Not curiosity, I've never been able to make it sound reasonable, a knowing that arrived already decided.

That same night, the man who had spent twelve years explaining why plants were a distraction bought the equipment and built a lab from nothing.

I told almost no one for four months. I was becoming the person I used to laugh at. So the work happened at night, more failed jars than anyone understood, and the flower gave up nothing.

Until something I couldn't explain away kept happening. She responded to how she was treated. Rushed or handled carelessly, she came out bitter and undrinkable. Approached with reverence, she became medicine. I had spent months treating her as material, as a scientist with trials and variables. Nothing landed.

So I stopped, and I prayed. To the flowers. To the jars. From one full moon to the next, because that was the time she was asking for, and I had stopped negotiating. Somewhere in that month, I began to feel her. That was the night I became the Blue Lotus Priest, not a title I chose, one that was given.

On the equinox, I held my first ceremony alone, with the most concentrated elixir I'd made. I saw visions. A warmth, then love, then a presence I had no framework for. Isis. What she opened was two or three times anything twelve years of practice had given me.

“I was a human being sitting with a master teacher.”

Only later did I learn that separating the flower into its parts, purifying them, and reuniting them had a name, spagyric alchemy, practised for thousands of years. I had walked onto that path guided by the plant, not a book.

The medicine never left my house for seven months. No product, no page, fewer than ten people knew. Then came the first ceremony, then fifty people, then a festival where I prepared fourteen litres and the line ran out of sight until the doors had to close. A whole room, held by one flower.

Later, I went to Egypt, the man Egypt never called, walking into her temples carrying the flower that called him instead. Horus at Edfu, Hathor at Dendera.

“I understood the temples were not monuments. They were the technology, and she was the key that opened the door.”

Where I stand now: five years with one flower, exclusively. I make the medicine by hand, slowly, with prayer, in small batches. I hold ceremony, in Prague and online, and have sat with over two hundred people in a single weekend.

In May 2026 I gave the keynote "Blue Lotus: The Ancient Key of Life" at TRYP Expo Berlin, one of Europe's largest gatherings on psychedelics and human flourishing. A man who once hid this work out of fear stood on that stage and taught it.

The flower was never a secret, but the way you meet her is.

The temples closed. The practice went quiet. And a man who believed in none of it now carries it.