GBG

friday 30 march 2012

.. .. to the Atlantis Bookshop in London’s Museum Street for the launching of Philip Heselton’s long-awaited WITCHFATHER, a life of Gerald Gardner.

It’s now more than ten years since I first met Philip. We shared a platform in Boscastle at an annual meeting of the Friends of the Witchcraft Museum. I was a last minute replacement for someone else. Philip was already an established author and authority on Gerald Gardner and the roots of Wicca. I spoke much more generally on fifty years of legal witchcraft in England.

In the years since then we’ve often been at the same Pagan events in London and elsewhere. Both of us excited at finding new fragments of evidence to fill in some of the gaps in the story. Gaps which are there because some of the most vital witnesses were constrained to keep secret those things which are to be kept secret.

Philip has now gone a long long way to filling in many of those gaps. He is an assiduous researcher : visiting key sites; talking with those still alive who remember; and pouring over page after page of archival material. And when he writes there is an easy clarity of communication between him and his readers.

Wicca has developed grown and changed – sometimes almost beyond recognition – since that wonderful evening in September 1939 when GBG was carried off to Old Dorothy’s Mill House and there initiated into secrets of the religion he had thought long dead.

Thank you, Philip, for once again carrying the past into the future.

francis cameron

oxford

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