Witches of History: Alex Sanders

The self-appointed “King of the Witches” and the father of Alexandrian Wicca is a character that is either loved or hated in the various divisions of Wicca. Like many enigmatic figures, the truth of his life is obscured in tall tales, most of which were spread by Alexander Sanders himself.

He was a man who was not afraid to speak openly about witchcraft, and that attracted many followers who revered him but also those who did everything they could to discredit him. To find out if the scorn was deserved or not, we must start at the beginning and unravel the long, convoluted life of Alexander Sanders.

Orrell Alexander Carter was born into rather scandalous circumstances on June 6, 1926, in Birkenhead, on the Wirral peninsula of England. His parents, Hannah Bibby and Harold Carter, were unmarried at the time of his birth, which caused quite the uproar in the community. His father worked as a general laborer while his mother was employed in domestic service.

Together they would go on to have six surviving children, with Sanders being the eldest. The family's means were quite limited, forcing them to live with Sanders' paternal grandmother to share costs. When the scandal of the out-of-wedlock birth was too much to bear for the group, they packed up and moved to Manchester and unofficially changed their surname to Sanders.

Alex began working for a chemist's laboratory in the mid-1940s, where he met his future wife, Doreen Stretton. The couple was married in 1948 and produced two children together by the names of Paul and Janice.

The marriage was ill-fitted, however, as Doreen wanted nothing to do with the supernatural, and Sanders was obsessed. She also did not want any more children, which thoroughly disheartened Sanders as he wanted many more.

Doreen ended up leaving Sanders when he was 26 and took the children. Sanders was so angry and grief-stricken that he cursed Doreen with abundant fertility. She eventually remarried and had three sets of twins!

Sanders, too, found new love in a girl twenty years his junior named Maxine Morris, who would eventually become High Priestess of his coven.

The match was another contentious one as Maxine's father disapproved of Sanders, thinking he was a homosexual. But the two were married anyway in 1968, much to her father's chagrin.

Many years later, however, Maxine would admit that Sanders was bi-sexual and had engaged in many sexual affairs with both men and women.

While this is nothing to turn your nose up to today, back then, this would have brought shame upon both families to the point where they would not have been welcomed in polite society if they had anything to do with Sanders.

Luckily we have moved past such things.

After his separation from Doreen and his children, Sanders admittedly became bitter and resentful. With the occult knowledge he possessed, he decided to live life by the left-hand path and turned to black magick. He sought success and sexual fulfillment through blood sacrifice, sexual rituals, and cursing others. It worked, and he soon found himself financially supported by a couple who had lost their son.

Sanders reminded them of him, and he exploited that vulnerability to the tune of a house of his own, ample spending money, nice clothes, and all the freedom he could ask for. He threw lavish parties, carried on sexual affairs with men and women alike, and performed black magick rituals with anyone curious as to the process. He took particular delight in cursing people who displeased him.

But when one of his mistresses committed suicide and his sister was diagnosed with cancer, Sanders became convinced that his delving into the dark arts was what had caused the misfortune. It was enough to turn his trajectory around, and he began pursuing a life more in alignment with the light—though he would remain a staunch fan of cursing others. Clearly, he didn't make it all the way into the light.

This is where we begin to run into inconsistencies in the stories Sanders told about his initiation into witchcraft. By his accounts, as recorded in his biography, King of the Witches by June Johns, Sanders claimed to have been initiated by his grandmother, Mary Bibby. He claimed that he stumbled upon her performing a ritual one night during an unannounced visit.

Angered that he “found out” her secret, Mary immediately had him remove his clothing and performed an initiation ritual on him. According to him, she said, “Make sure that you don't tell another living soul what you've seen today. If you do...I'll kill you.” However, this account was later disproven as it was discovered that Mary Bibby died in 1907 when his mother was only four years old.

But Sanders would spend his whole life insisting that he descended from a line of witches dating back to the Pendle witch trial in 1612.

While there are several other stories about his initiation, the one with the most credibility comes from a woman named Pat Kopinski, who allowed Sanders to copy from her Book of Shadows after initiating him into Gardnerian witchcraft in 1962. Pat was originally a member of a coven led by a woman named Patricia Crowther.

Sanders had gone to her first asking to be initiated, but Patricia refused, saying that Sanders was too “troublesome.” She drew this conclusion after Sanders convinced the Manchester Evening News to run a front-page story on Wicca where he revealed many of the sacred rituals and rites reserved for the initiated.

This infuriated many witches as they felt he had betrayed the secrecy of their orders. However, the article succeeded in attracting many more witches to the craft. By 1965, Sanders claimed that he had initiated 1,623 people into over 100 covens. This is what his followers claim earned him the title of “The King of the Witches.”

Due to Sanders' many illicit affairs, Maxine decided to leave him in1971. Sanders moved to Sussex while Maxine stayed in London and continued running the coven and teaching witchcraft in the Alexandrian tradition.

Although they remained separated, they maintained a love/hate relationship with occasional passionate trysts followed by bouts of cursing one another. This would continue until Sanders' death in 1988 from lung cancer.

In the years leading up to his death, Sanders began to feel remorse for the evil deeds he had done over his lifetime. He wished to make amends and expressed the desire that all of the divided covens and traditions might one day unite together and share knowledge instead of hoarding it away from each other. He wished that all would “unite in brotherly love before the face of the Lady and the Lord.”

In 1979, Sanders began working with a man named Derek Taylor, a trance medium and psychic. The two would go on to develop the Ordine Della Luna in Constantinople, which was based on Sanders' magickal teachings.

The pair were reportedly working with disembodied spirits, celestial intelligence, and the demiurge. They recorded several journals documenting their channeling experiences as well as a warning for a coming WW III, which would be “apocalyptic.” However, no dates were mentioned, and predictions of WW III have been rampant ever since the end of WW II. So do with that what you will.

Sanders founded another group named the Order of Deucalion, which operated as an inner cell of the Ordine Della Luna. The Order of Deucalion focused on magickal research believed to be from the time of Atlantis. Sanders, in particular, believed Merlin was the last leader of the Atlantean teachings and held him in high reverence.

Sanders became a larger-than-life figure both in life and in death. The continuation of the Alexandrian tradition is proof that he and his teachings are still revered in Western European and North American covens to this day. Whether you approve of his methods or not, no one attracted more witches to the craft than Sanders.

He helped get Wicca into the mainstream through interviews, movies, and writings that spread over the globe and are still consumed by witches, old and young, who wish to learn the craft. His past is spotty and full of darkness, but he did attempt to make amends for it in the end. Whether it was enough is only for you to decide, dear reader.

Some believe there is no redemption for those who turn to the dark arts as the magick they unleash can never be destroyed, only overcome. But in the end, those who turn to the left hand only hurt themselves and those who participate in the darkness with them.

So it leaves room to consider forgiving those who have fallen and make a solid attempt to rise again. After all, we all have moments of weakness in our darkest moments. It takes a truly strong person to admit they were wrong and try to heal the damage they caused.

For that alone, we tip our witch's hat to Alex Sanders and thank him for his contribution to the craft and the legacy he created.