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.