RECALLING ALEX SANDERS
by Jack Pleasant
I was in for a surprise when Alex Sanders offered to show
me his Wiccan temple. I was visiting the famous magician and self-styled
King of the Witches at his cottage in the Old Town at Bexhill-on-Sea, in
Sussex, in 1978, to interview him for a national magazine. He was pleasant
and amusing and we'd already had a couple of drinks at his favourite
nearby pub, The Bell.
‘This is where it all happens,’ he said with a mischievous smile as he
opened the door to the temple. Remarkably, I found it was furnished almost
completely with Christian items, including statues of Christ and the
Virgin Mary.
‘Even some witches have told me it’s blasphemous to practise
witchcraft in what looks like a Christian chapel‚’ he said. ‘But for
me, Christ represents the Sun God and Mary the Earth Mother. Christianity
and witchcraft may seem very different, but underneath they have a lot in
common. I didn't deliberately gather all these Christian objects, I might
add. It was quite strange. Soon after I moved in here, over a short period
various people suddenly started offering them to me. Others were
mysteriously left in the garden. It was as if some higher power had
decreed that's how my temple should be.’
At the time, Alex, then aged 52, had a partner who was a young male civil
servant.
'I love him utterly,’ he maintained. 'He was married to a beautiful
girl, but she didn't stand a chance against me. He was dressed as a
skinhead when I first met him four years ago, with the regulation shaven
head, bovver boots and turned-up jeans. Today, he is a presentable young
man. Women give me fulfillment, but I find happiness with men.'
His well known bi-sexuality, it's suggested, may have resulted from an
experience as a boy with the infamous occultist and reputed 'Wickedest Man
in the World', Aleister Crowley.
Sanders had been initiated as a witch, he claimed, at aged just seven, by
his witch grandmother, Mary Bibby, whom he had chanced on standing naked
in the kitchen in a circle drawn on the floor.
'She ordered me to strip naked and enter the circle,’ he recalled.
‘She carried out a ritual and then on her instructions, as I bent down
with my head between my thighs she nicked my scrotum with a knife and said
“You are one of us now.” She later gave me her Book of Shadows to copy
into my own and taught me all the rites'.
At ten, she took him to London to meet Aleister Crowley, whom she
knew.
'She left me with Crowley for the night and he carried out some of his sex
magic with me,’ said Alex. 'It wasn't a very nice experience. To me, as
a young boy, he was just a horrible, smelly, old man. Before I left he
tattooed his “mark of the beast” on my hand. It's still there. It
hardly
turned me off sex though. At one time when I was still in London with my
second wife, Maxine, I also had two mistresses and nine male lovers. It's
a much quieter life here in Bexhill-on-Sea. My current coven is only five-strong
and just one of them is a woman.'
Outrageous and a born showman as he was, Alex Sanders has to be credited
with publicising modern witchcraft and, indeed, founding in the 196Os its
flourishing Alexandrian branch of Wicca to rival the existing Gardnerian
of Gerald Gardner. Although some of his magic was 'grey’, he insisted to
me that most of it was 'white’, often aimed at healing people. He told
me that
while at Bexhill he had helped a number of drug addicts to get off heavy
drugs and cured a woman of cystitis by simply placing his hands on her
head and 'willing her illness away'.
He also claimed to have used magic to help women with fertility problems
and people just having trouble getting a job.
But with a wicked grin he did admit that on occasion he got rid of
people's warts by magically transferring them to somebody else he didn't
like. His favourite targets for this, he revealed, were passing traffic
wardens! And friends maintained that he had only to whistle the funeral
march at someone who had upset him to have them in hospital within the
week.
(*Jack Pleasant adds: ‘I came to be fond of Alex Sanders and to
consider him an entertaining friend. It pleased him when on occasion, I
called on him bearing a bottle of the appalling, to my taste, cheap,
sweet, white Spanish wine that he enjoyed. I missed him when he died in
1988, choosing the significant Wiccan date to pass on to the Summerlands
of April 3Oth -
Beltane Eve.')
