Alex Sanders

Alex Sanders (1926-1988) was a British occultist and witch who founded the Alexandrian tradition of Wicca with his wife Maxine in Manchester and London in the 1960s, becoming one of the most publicly visible figures in modern British witchcraft. He styled himself the “King of the Witches,” a title that embodied both his genuine magnetism and his appetite for public attention that generated significant controversy within the broader witchcraft community. The tradition he established has become one of the major lineages of British Traditional Wicca, with initiated practitioners working in covens across the English-speaking world and beyond.

Life and work

Alex Sanders was born in Manchester in 1926. The biographical details of his early life are shaped considerably by his own accounts, which were dramatically compelling but historically unreliable. His claim to have been initiated into witchcraft by his grandmother when she caught him witnessing a ritual in her kitchen has not been corroborated by any external evidence, and researchers into Wicca’s history consider it almost certainly a fabrication. What does appear to be established is that Sanders encountered Gardnerian Wicca material, almost certainly a copy of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows that was circulating beyond the tradition’s authorized channels, and used it as the foundation for the tradition he began building in Manchester in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

His meeting with Maxine Morris (born 1946), who would become Maxine Sanders, transformed the scale and character of his coven work. Maxine was initiated in 1965 and became his High Priestess. The couple moved to London, where they established a coven that attracted significant membership and, through Sanders’s active cultivation of press relationships, considerable public attention. He invited journalists, documentary filmmakers, and curious members of the public to witness aspects of their ritual work in ways that no Gardnerian coven would have considered appropriate.

The 1969 documentary film Legend of the Witches, directed by Malcolm Leigh, was the most significant product of this public engagement. The film shows initiations, ritual practice, and ceremonial magic including the use of Solomonic magical tools and Hebrew divine names, elements that distinguish Alexandrian practice from standard Gardnerian working. The film was widely seen and brought both practitioners and criticism to the Sanders.

Janet Farrar (then Janet Owen) and Stewart Farrar encountered Sanders’s coven through Stewart’s journalistic assignment to write about it in 1969. Both were initiated and became practitioners. Their subsequent books, particularly What Witches Do (1971), Eight Sabbats for Witches (1981), and The Witches’ Way (1984), provided the most systematic and accessible documentation of Alexandrian practice available and remain important references for the tradition today.

The Sanders divorced in the 1970s though remained connected through the tradition. Alex Sanders spent his later years living quietly, and his health declined in the 1980s. He died in 1988 from a chest condition.

Legacy

The Alexandrian tradition that Sanders founded has proven durable beyond the controversies of its founding. Its combination of Wiccan structure with ceremonial magic elements and its accessibility through the Farrar books gave it a distinct character and a wide reach. Many of the most influential Wiccan practitioners of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries trace their lineage through the Alexandrian line.

Maxine Sanders continued to be a significant and active figure in the tradition after Alex’s death, maintaining the lineage, initiating practitioners, and writing and speaking about Alexandrian practice and its history. Her memoir and various interviews provide a perspective on the tradition’s formative period that complements and sometimes challenges the account given through Alex’s own self-presentation.

The Alexandrian tradition’s willingness to publish its core material through the Farrar books, which made much of the tradition’s ritual structure available to non-initiates, also shaped the broader landscape of published Wicca and influenced how eclectic practitioners around the world understood and approached Wiccan ritual.

Sanders remains a complex figure: genuinely gifted and charismatic, intellectually curious about magic in ways that the ceremonial elements of his tradition reflect, capable of building a real community and real spiritual practice around himself, and at the same time given to fabrication, self-aggrandizement, and a media relationship that many in the broader witchcraft community considered irresponsible. His legacy in the Alexandrian tradition is more lasting than his personal reputation, which is perhaps as it should be.

In myth and popular culture

Alex Sanders’s deliberate courting of the media gave him an unusual degree of cultural presence for a practicing witch. The 1969 documentary “Legend of the Witches,” directed by Malcolm Leigh and released through Tigon Pictures, brought Sanders and his wife Maxine to a wide public audience. The film showed initiations, rituals, and magical workings in considerable detail, and it became one of the most-seen documentaries on witchcraft of its era, influencing how a generation of British viewers understood what witchcraft actually looked like in practice. A second documentary, “Not of This World,” followed in 1978.

June Johns’s biography “King of the Witches” (1969) was the primary popular account of Sanders’s life during his lifetime, presenting his claims largely uncritically and giving wide circulation to the grandmother initiation story and other elements of his self-constructed mythology. The book was a bestseller in its genre and shaped how Sanders was understood by readers who did not have access to primary sources.

Stewart and Janet Farrar’s “What Witches Do” (1971), which grew from Stewart Farrar’s journalistic assignment to write about Sanders’s coven, reached a far larger and more lasting audience than the biographical accounts. As a sincere and detailed account of Alexandrian practice by two participants who became serious practitioners, it introduced the tradition to practitioners in Britain, North America, and beyond and remains an important text in the tradition today.

Myths and facts

Several persistent beliefs about Alex Sanders and the tradition he founded deserve examination.

• The claim that Sanders was initiated into witchcraft by his grandmother as a child in Manchester has been accepted in many popular accounts as fact. No corroborating evidence has been found; historians of Wicca, including Ronald Hutton, regard it as almost certainly a fabrication designed to establish a lineage independent of Gardnerian Wicca.
• Sanders is sometimes described as having broken away from Gardnerian Wicca after receiving a legitimate Gardnerian initiation. The evidence suggests he obtained a copy of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows through unofficial channels rather than through formal initiation; the Alexandrian tradition was built on this foundation, not on a schism from an authorized Gardnerian lineage.
• Alexandrian Wicca is sometimes characterized as simply a copy of Gardnerian Wicca with extra ceremonial magic added. The traditions share a common source but developed distinctly over six decades; contemporary Alexandrian practice has its own body of transmitted material, its own sensibility, and a lineage independent of the Gardnerian line.
• Sanders’s title “King of the Witches” is sometimes presented as a formal position within the British witchcraft community. It was a media creation, coined by tabloid journalists and enthusiastically adopted by Sanders; no such formal title existed or was conferred by any recognized body in the witchcraft community.
• The Alexandrian tradition is sometimes assumed to have declined after Sanders’s death. In fact, through the ongoing work of Maxine Sanders, the Farrar books, and numerous lineaged covens worldwide, Alexandrian Wicca is a living and internationally active tradition.