Philip Heselton - 2000 Onwards: Gerald Gardner and The Origins of Wicca

2000 Onwards: Gerald Gardner and The Origins of Wicca

Since 2000, Heselton's publications have all centred around the origins of Wicca and its populariser (or inventor) Gerald Gardner. One review says of Heselton that "...he has dug deeper than anyone before him into the life and associates of Gerald B. Gardner ... No historian of Wicca's beginnings has conducted such patient and detailed research into primary sources. Heselton's view of Gardner is that he genuinely did make contact with a group who were maintaining remnants of an 'Old Religion', into which he was initiated in 1939 much as he describes. Many reviewers have greeted his work enthusiastically, treating it as a vindication of traditional accounts of Wiccan origins. Others have been less enthusiastic, describing the work as speculative. A more critical account of the origins of Wicca was previously provided by Ronald Hutton but the relationship between the two appears warm: Hutton has written in the foreword to Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: "Philip Heselton is the most interesting, valuable and enjoyable author who has yet written on what is becoming one of the greatest riddles in the history of modern religion: the origins of pagan witchcraft".

In 2012 Heselton's long-awaited biography of Gardner in two volumes, Witchfather was published. This is the first posthumous biography of Gardner, and only the second after Gerald Gardner, Witch, published in 1960 and attributed to Gardner's initiate Jack Bracelin, but in fact written by Idries Shah.