Alex Sanders

Alex Sanders was born Orrell Alexander Carter in Birkenhead in 1926 and grew up poor in Manchester. The story he told of his beginnings, that his Welsh grandmother initiated him as a child into a hereditary witch cult, was repeated in June Johns's 1969 biography King of the Witches and became part of his legend; historians of Wicca, examining the documentary trail, have found instead a man who sought entry to Gardnerian witchcraft in the early 1960s, obtained a copy of the Book of Shadows, and built his own practice from it. Sanders never resolved the contradiction and never seemed to feel he needed to.

What is not in dispute is what he built. From about 1965, with his young and formidable wife Maxine, he ran a London flat that became the busiest initiation center in British witchcraft, bringing hundreds into the craft at a pace the older covens thought reckless. His followers proclaimed him King of the Witches, a title the Gardnerian establishment scorned, and he embraced television, tabloids and film with an appetite no witch before him had shown. The publicity that made him notorious also made Wicca visible: for a generation of seekers in Britain and on the continent, the witchcraft they first saw was Alex Sanders working in a chalk circle under studio lights. He died in 1988, still the most famous witch in England.

The tradition Sanders founded, named Alexandrian after him, is with Gardnerian Wicca one of the two great initiatory lines of the modern religion. Structurally the two are close: three degrees, a coven led by a high priestess and high priest, the same wheel of seasonal festivals, and a Book of Shadows that in the Alexandrian case descends from the Gardnerian text Sanders obtained. What distinguished Alexandrian practice was its appetite for the wider Western magical inheritance. Sanders drew freely on ceremonial magic, the Kabbalah, Enochian material and spirit evocation, and Alexandrian covens have tended ever since to train in these arts alongside witchcraft proper, where stricter Gardnerians kept them at arm's length.

The tradition spread through the couples the Sanderses initiated, most consequentially Janet and Stewart Farrar, whose books from the 1970s onward laid Alexandrian derived practice open to the public and shaped how Wicca was learned far beyond any coven. Alexandrian lines took root in continental Europe, the Americas, South Africa and Australia, and survived their founder's divorce from Maxine and his later, quieter years. Scholars such as Ronald Hutton treat Sanders as the pivotal second founder of Wicca: a man whose personal myth was largely invention, and whose tradition became entirely real.