Alex Sanders (Wiccan)

Alex Sanders
Alex Sanders, in ritual regalia
Born	Orrell Alexander Carter (1926-06-06)6 June 1926 Birkenhead, England
Died	30 April 1988(1988-04-30) (aged 61) Sussex, England
Occupation	Wiccan Priest
Spouses	Doreen Stretton; Arline M Morris; Gillian Sicka[1]
Children	5

Alex Sanders (6 June 1926 – 30 April 1988), born Orrell Alexander Carter,^[1] who went under the craft name Verbius,^[2] 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),^[1] as a child, though recent research has disproven this,^[1] 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^[3] 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,"^[4] 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.^[5]

Sanders died on 30 April 1988 at St. Mary's Hospital at Hastings of cancer of the bronchus with bone metastasis.^[1]