Alex Sanders (6 June 1926 – 30 April 1988), born Orrell Alexander Carter, who went under the craft name Verbius, 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 a child, though recent research has disproven this, with Bibby dying in 1907, some 19 years before Sanders' birth.
Throughout the 1960s, he would court publicity in the press, appearing in a number of documentaries, marrying the 20 years younger Maxine Sanders, and was elected as "King of the [Alexandrian] Witches" in 1965 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.
Early life
Born to unmarried Hannah Jane Bibby and Orrell 'Harold' Alexander Carter, Sanders was born as Orrell Alexander Carter on 6 June 1926 at 56 Church Road, Tranmere, Birkenhead, and was the eldest of six surviving children. Sanders' father was a general labourer while his mother was a domestic servant. Later, the family, who had been living at the home of Sanders' paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Carter (née Gandy), at 1 Moon St. Birkenhead, moved to Cornbrook Street, Old Trafford, Manchester, and unofficially changed their name to Sanders. Sanders was unaware of his official surname of 'Carter' until he applied for a passport later in life, and only changed his name by deed poll in the 1960s.
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 when he was 22, using the name Alexander O. Sanders. They had two children, Paul and Janice. Sanders wanted more children but Doreen didn't; she also disapproved of the supernatural. The marriage quickly deteriorated and Doreen took the children and left Sanders when he was 26. According to Maxine Sanders, Sanders was grief-stricken and cursed Doreen with fertility; she remarried and had three sets of twins.
Whilst working in a pharmaceutical company, Sanders became friends with Maxine Sanders' (née Morris) mother, however, they lost contact for a while, probably due to the "intense dislike" that Maxine's father had for him (being convinced Alex was homosexual). Sanders and Arline M. Morris (Maxine) married in June in 1968 in Kensington.
After his divorce from Maxine, Sanders married for a third and final time to Gillian Sicka in December in 1982 in Hastings and Rother.
Initiation into Gardnerian Witchcraft
Several contradictory accounts exist of Sanders' initiation into Gardnerian Witchcraft, and even his own accounts are inconsistent. One account, given in Sanders' biography, King of the Witches by June Johns, tells that Alex, visiting his Welsh grandmother unannounced, stumbled upon her performing a ritual. Unhappy that Sanders had not knocked to make his presence known, Bibby told Sanders to take off his clothes, and that she was going to "make sure that you don't tell another living soul what you have seen this day," adding 'if you do ... I'll kill you."
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. This claim is corroborated by Maxine Sanders, Sanders' future wife and High Priestess.