King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders is June Johns's 1969 biography of Alex Sanders, published in London by Peter Davies while Sanders was actively building his public reputation as a self styled king of the witches and founding, with his wife Maxine Sanders, the tradition later known as Alexandrian Wicca. Johns had direct access to Sanders and his coven, and the book documents the tradition's public founding history: Sanders's own account of his initiation and his role organizing what became a distinct branch of Wicca, material the tradition treats as open rather than oathbound. It does not describe or draw on the coven's Book of Shadows or any degree material, which Alexandrian Wicca restricts to initiates who receive it from their initiator under oath. As a sympathetic, largely uncritical account written with its subject's cooperation, its more extravagant biographical claims benefit from being weighed against later, more independent historical treatments.
Facts
Subject Matter
Religious Subject MatterThe public founding history of Alexandrian Wicca: Alex Sanders's own account of his initiation and his and Maxine Sanders's organizing of the tradition, contemporary with the events it describes. 1 Scholarly ReceptionThe book reports, in Alex Sanders's own words, that he was initiated into witchcraft as a child by his grandmother Mary Bibby. Genealogical research published by the Alexandrian Witchcraft Timeline and Archive (Christine Wibberley, 2018), using English civil registration records, found that Mary Bibby died in 1907, more than a decade before Sanders was born and while his own mother was a small child, which the research concludes rules the story out as an accurate historical account. 2 Production
Publication Year Place of OriginLondon, United Kingdom (Peter Davies Ltd.) 1 Learn More
A Biography Written While Its Subject Was Still Performing
Most biographies arrive after their subject's reputation has already settled. June Johns's King of the Witches, published in London in 1969, did the opposite: it appeared while Alex Sanders was still actively building the very reputation the book describes, a self styled king of the witches courting newspapers and television cameras at the same time he was organizing what would become Alexandrian Wicca.
Johns had direct access to Sanders and the people around him, which gives the book a value few later accounts can match: it captures how Sanders presented himself and his movement to the public in real time, not as later historians reconstructed it. That same closeness is also its limit. Sanders was, by every account including sympathetic ones, an accomplished self promoter, and Johns wrote with his cooperation rather than at a critical distance from him.
Read today, the book works best as a period document rather than a settled historical record. Its account of Sanders's own telling of his initiation and the founding of his coven is valuable precisely because it shows what Sanders wanted believed at the time, which is not always the same thing as what later, more independent historians have been able to confirm about Alexandrian Wicca's actual early years.
What the Book Documents and What the Tradition Still Guards
Alexandrian Wicca carries the same oathbound structure as the Gardnerian tradition it grew out of: initiation into a coven, three degrees, and a Book of Shadows and degree material passed from initiator to initiate under oath rather than published for anyone to read. None of that material appears in this atlas, and none of it appears in June Johns's 1969 biography of the tradition's founder either.
What King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders documents instead is the tradition's public founding history: who Alex Sanders was, how he presented his own initiation to a journalist with direct access to him, and how he and Maxine Sanders organized the coven that grew into a distinct branch of Wicca in 1960s London. That is public material by its nature, a contemporary account written for a general readership, not a leaked or reconstructed version of anything Alexandrian covens keep private.
The distinction matters because it is easy to assume any book about a secretive tradition must be trading in its secrets. This one is not. It is a portrait of a public figure at a specific moment, written from the outside, about a man who was, by every account, eager to be written about. The oathbound material stayed exactly where Alexandrian covens have always kept it: with the covens.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Alexandrian Wicca restricts only the oathbound Book of Shadows and degree material transmitted under oath, and explicitly leaves the tradition's public founding history open. This is a contemporary biography of that founding, not any part of the restricted material.
Sources
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