King of the Witches

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.