Alex Sanders

Alex Sanders (6 June 1926 – 30 April 1988), born Orrell Alexander Carter, was an English occultist and High Priest in the modern Pagan religion of Wicca, responsible for founding, and later developing with Maxine Sanders, the tradition of Alexandrian Wicca, also called Alexandrian Witchcraft, during the 1960s.

Raised in a working-class family, Alex, as a young man, began working as a medium in the local Spiritualist Churches before going on to study and practise ceremonial magic. In 1963, he was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca before founding his own coven, through which he merged many aspects of ceremonial magic into Wicca. He claimed to have been initiated by his Welsh-speaking grandmother, Mary Bibby (née Roberts), as he "[was] directly descended from witches, and equipped with knowledge that outstrips [his witches][...] [we formally acknowledge you] as the foremost authority on witchcraft," something that led to other prominent Gardnerian Witches, such as Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, attacking him in the press. In the late 1970s and 1980s and prior to his death, he went on to found and work with a ceremonial magical group known as the Ordine Della Luna.

Sanders died on 30 April 1988 at St. Mary's Hospital at Hastings of cancer of the bronchus with bone metastasis. and was the eldest of six surviving children. Sanders' father was a general labourer while his mother was a domestic servant.

Family life Around the mid 1940s, he began working for a manufacturing chemist's laboratory in Manchester. He married a co-worker, nineteen-year-old Doreen Stretton, in 1948 Sanders wanted more children but Doreen did not; she also disapproved of the supernatural.

However, this assertion that Sanders was initiated by his grandmother in any fashion has been discredited, as Wibberley (2018) states:

Gardnerian High Priestess Patricia Crowther tells a different story. According to letters she claims she received from him in 1961, he did not at that time claim to be an initiate, but felt an affinity with the occult and had experienced second sight. In a 1962 interview, Sanders claimed to have been initiated for a year, working in a coven led by a woman from Nottingham. The exact identity of 'Medea' is still a debated topic within the Alexandrian Witchcraft and larger witchcraft community. Having said that, it is most likely that Sanders was initiated by a woman named Pat Kopinski, who then let Sanders copy her Book of Shadows. Di Fiosa (2010) notes that there are three spellings of Pat's surname: Kopinski, as used by Pat herself; Kopanski; and Kasprzynski.

When Sanders publicly revealed himself as a witch, however, Mrs. Sanders feigned shock and threatened a nervous breakdown. During this period, Sanders' coven worked at his home at 24 Egerton Road North, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester. Sanders continued to attract media attention which brought him more followers, and by 1965, Sanders claimed to have initiated 1,623 people in 100 covens. He was then proclaimed "King of the [Alexandrian] Witches".

Sanders' alleged magical feats included creating familiars and healing warts, illnesses, and physical deformities.

Sanders apparently joined other esoteric and chivalric orders in the early part of 1968, which numbered 16 in 1974, and possibly more before his death. These included the Knights Templar, the Order of Saint Michael, and the Order of Saint George. According to Maxine Sanders, Sanders also founded a number of Orders, including Order of the Romaic Crescent and its offshoot, Ordine Della Luna.

Sanders' sister, Joan, was injured in an accidental shooting and shortly after was diagnosed with terminal cancer at a very young age. Sanders blamed his sister's ill-health on himself for his involvement in the left hand path, and resolved to stop using his magic for selfish reasons and instead teach it to others.

In 1963, Sanders began to study the works of Abramelin the Mage. It was around this time, Di Fiosa (2004) notes, that Sanders believed that angels told him to seek employment as a porter, book-duster, and odd-job man in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, where he could access an original copy of the Key of Solomon. Not long thereafter, Sanders' employment was terminated for dismantling the late 19th century edition of the Mathers' translation of the Key of Solomon. As well as influence from Goetia, which Sanders incorporated into his version of Wicca, Sanders was greatly influenced by the teachings of Eliphas Levi.

Births, relationships, and the media

During the 1960s, Sanders met Arline Maxine Morris (Maxine Sanders). Morris was 20 years his junior and was initiated into Sanders' coven in 1964 and went on to become his High Priestess. In 1965, they handfasted, and in 1968, they married in a civil ceremony and moved into a basement flat near Notting Hill Gate in London, where they ran their coven and taught classes on Witchcraft. Earlier that year, their daughter, Maya Alexandria, was born.

According to Maxine, Sanders, as a bisexual man, also had a number of relationships with men during his relationship with Maxine.

The projection of Sanders into the national public spotlight resulted from a sensational newspaper article in 1969, which led to the romanticised biography, King of the Witches, by June Johns in 1969, and the film Legend of the Witches (1970). These led to greater publicity, guest appearances on talk-shows, and public speaking engagements. It seemed to other witches that Sanders was exploiting the Craft and dragging it through the gutter press.

According to Maxine Sanders, Sanders never courted publicity, but was simply unable to avoid it. She describes how Sanders' initial rise to fame came through an attempt to distract media attention away from other witches. The couple running a coven that Sanders belonged to were practising Christians, and the local press had become curious about their activities. Had they been exposed it would have been disastrous for them. Sanders offered the Press an alternative story, proposing to hold a ritual at a magical site at Alderley Edge, where he would raise a man from the dead. A bandaged up figure lying on a stone altar was examined by one of Sanders' colleagues posing as a G.P., who certified it was indeed a corpse.

Alex promised the reporter and photographer that he would bring the corpse back to life. It would respond to an ancient and strange invocation, which was in reality a Swiss roll recipe read backwards. After much mumbo jumbo Alex dramatically intoned the invocation slowly and with great deliberation, the corpse couldn't help but respond to such power. It sounds ridiculous today that anyone could fall for it, but the pressmen ran away with their story, which made the headlines. These were the days of innocence, but the Christians were safe and Alex was on his way to a life of self-imposed notoriety. — Sanders, M.

In 1979, Sanders announced to the witchcraft community that he wished "to make amends for some of the past hurts that I have given and many public stupidities I created for others of the Craft", and expressed his desire that the Wica should some day put aside their differences and "unite in brotherly love before the face of the Lady and the Lord", allowing them to become great again and respected in the outside world.

From 1979 onwards, Sanders began working in magical partnership with Derek Taylor, a psychic and trance medium. Together, they developed the magical work of Sanders' Order, the Ordine Della Luna in Constantinople, which he was chartered to operate as Grand Prior for England and Wales by a contact in London in 1967 who claimed to be a descendant of the Byzantine Palaeologos dynasty, but who was actually an eccentric Englishman of Newport on the Isle of Man called Peter Francis Mills. The pair were reportedly working with celestial intelligences, disembodied spirits, and the demiurge itself. They recorded several journals of channelled notes, including warning of an apocalyptic World War III.

Another group which Sanders operated in London during the 1960s was the Order of Deucalion, a focus for Atlantean magical research and inner contacts, as Sanders taught that Merlin was an important leader of the last Atlantean migratory wave into Western Europe.

Works