Copies of the written records of these sessions can be found in the archive of the Museum of Witchcraft at Boscastle. They make fascinating, if mind-boggling, reading, and illustrate an aspect of Alexandrian Wicca that is little known. In 1981, for instance, Sanders began receiving messages from the departed spirit of a woman called Mrs. Grieve, who used to live in Eastbourne, and from an ancient Egyptian called Neph Kem. The latter told him President Sadat of Egypt was the incarnation of the heretical pharaoh Ankhenaton, a historical figure who has always been popular with occultists. The ancient Egyptian said the only hope for peace in the Middle East was for Egypt to forge a political and military alliance with the then Soviet Union. Sanders wrote three times to the Egyptian president, informing him of this spirit message, and was concerned none of his letters had been received, as he had no reply! He also received messages from the Archangel Michael about the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, saying she was destined to become the head of the European Union despite her fierce anti-European stance, and the French president François Mitterand, who it is now known was interested in esoteric matters (doc. ref. 1006b in MOW archive).
Later in their spirit communications, Sanders and Taylor were contacted by entities calling themselves the “Sons of God,” the “Children of the Stars,” or the “Cupbearers of Ganymede.” These were allegedly occupants of UFOs from other galaxies stationed in our solar system, specifically on a base on one of Jupiter’s moons. The messages received from these extraterrestrial sources reflected those also given to UFO abductees at the time. The two men were advised Earth faced a global disaster in the future. Before it occurred, the human race would be taken to a previously unknown planet in the solar system called Gea that was being prepared by the alien saviors.
In October 1986, an entity called Mentha began communicating from the constellation of Hercules. It claimed to be the commander of two million (space?) ships and was on a mission to Earth to “break down the mental barriers between the United States of Soviet Russia [sic] and the United States of America.” It also said its task was “to protect the Cosmological Empires against the damagement [sic] of the conservation of energies of our Galaxies through the experiments of humanity” (doc. 1012a in MOW archives). Other alien contacts apart from Mentha included an entity saying it was the ruler of Callisto, another Jovian moon.
Most of the messages received by Alex Sanders and Derek Taylor were of a political nature. On one occasion a spirit speaking through Sanders warned that King Juan Carlos of Spain was in imminent danger from left-wing forces plotting to overthrow the monarchy and establish a dictatorship. Sanders was also told of an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, the possibility of letter bombs being sent to Members of the British Parliament, and future wars over the supply of oil. Derek Taylor sent a copy of the trance workings to his local MP in May 1984, but there is no record he got a reply. He also wrote to the president of Argentina, warning him of a possible coup.
Meanwhile Maxine Sanders was also taking Alexandrian Wicca in a new direction under the influence of her new High Priest, David Goddard, who was a ceremonial magician and Cabbalist. She had become interested in the teachings of the Liberal Catholic Church, an unorthodox Christian offshoot of the Theosophical Society, and Goddard had been ordained in its priesthood. Maxine Sanders decided to subscribe to a correspondence course on the Cabbala established by the American occultist Paul Foster Case (1884–1956) and still run by his magic group, the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA). As a result she and Goddard started a ceremonial magic group as an adjunct to the coven. Its members included a retired accountant, the wife of a Cambridge University lecturer, a police officer, and a ladies’ hairdresser (Maxine Sanders 2008: 260–261).
Maxine claimed that, despite his letter of public apology published in The Cauldron, her ex-husband was still “using his title ‘King of the Witches’ in a way that offended other witches, craved publicity, and was telling ridiculous stories to satisfy his ego.” She claimed that while originally his symbiotic relationship with the press was designed to open up the Craft to a wider audience, it now “served merely to shore up his own desperate monomania.” Because the articles that were still appearing in the newspapers about the King of the Witches were undoing the previous good work of the 1960s and 1970s (which seems unlikely considering their content), the mysterious Council of Elders decided to take drastic action. A meeting was convened of representatives from different covens, and it was decided to undo the rite of kingship granted to Sanders in 1969. He was not informed of this event, although a couple of days later he told Maxine he felt he had been released from a great burden (Ibid., 261).
When Sanders moved to Sussex in the 1970s, he became a serious drinker of the spirit Pernod and then brandy mixed with white wine. He was also a heavy smoker, so it was not really surprising in 1986 when he was diagnosed with cancer. Along with the illness came remorse, and when Sanders realized he was dying he wrote a letter to “Lady Veda,” Maxine’s witch name, saying he was still a chauvinist pig and would always be one. However, he hoped that, as the representative of the Goddess on Earth, she would continue the ceremonies, and if she did there would be a great future for Wicca. He signed the letter with his full witch name “Verbius Alexander Rex” (Ibid., 262).
By late 1987, Sanders’ illness had become worse, forcing him to undergo radiotherapy treatment for the spreading cancer. At first he was looked after by a private nurse arranged by Maxine, and then towards the close of his life he entered a nursing home. Finally he had to be moved to hospital where he passed to spirit in the early hours of April 30 (Beltane Eve), 1988. He named Maxine as his next-of-kin, which meant she was responsible for the funeral. He had died insolvent, so his friends and coven rallied around to pay for it. At first Maxine wanted David Goddard to officiate at it in his position as a Liberal Catholic priest. Unfortunately his bishop refused permission as he did not want adverse publicity attracted to the Church (Ibid., 280).
In the end, the funeral service was carried out by a priestess of the Craft, Victoria Lester (witch name “Aislynn”), who was also a Christian, and organized by Seldy Bate and Nigel Bourne (no relation to Lois Bourne), two leading Alexandrian witches from South London. Doreen Valiente described it a “dignified and moving ceremony, although some witches found it a curious mingling of pagan, Christian and Qabalistic elements” (1989: 176). It included a reading from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, which was one of Alex Sanders’ favorite biblical passages. Maxine Sanders admitted that the officiant at the service “got carried away,” and some of the witches present thought it was far too Christian in tone (2008: 281).
About a hundred witches from all over Britain attended the funeral at Hastings crematorium, where forty-two years before Aleister Crowley had been cremated following a service inaccurately described by the press as a “Black Mass.” In fact it was an extract from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass. A national newspaper report before Sanders’ funeral claimed witches from all over the world would be attending. In fact, to the relief of many of Alexandrians, the media largely ignored the event. The local paper The Brighton Evening Argus did publish a small report headlined “No Tears as Witch is laid to Rest.” The headline was based on a comment made by Maxine Sanders that witches never cry when someone dies because they believe in reincarnation. She was described in the article as the ‘“Witch Queen Emeritus,” and was quoted as saying there would be no “prancing around naked” at the funeral service, which must have been a great relief to the crematorium owners.
The newspaper also picked up on the thorny question of succession within the Alexandrian tradition to the position of witch king, despite the fact the Council of Elders had stripped Sanders of the title before his death so it could not be passed on. Maxine Sanders said that Derek Taylor, whom she described as “a publicity seeker,” had already alerted the press to the story. He told the newspapers he favored Alex and Maxine’s fifteen-year-old so
n, Victor, for the role, and this was confirmed by a spirit message. One press report said the new “King of the Witches” would hold dominion over thousands of witches all over the world,” and added other rival candidates were ready and waiting to “throw their pointed hats into the circle” (Ibid.).
Maxine Sanders disagreed with Taylor and did not want her son involved. She told Victor, who was quite excited about the prospect, it would be “an empty title created to satisfy the sycophantic egotists who were close to Alex, and wanted to glory in his faded light.” A press statement was eventually issued by Seldy Bate and Nigel Bourne on Maxine’s behalf (the Council of Elders having apparently vanished from the scene). This statement announced there would be no King of the Witches appointed in the foreseeable future, and in fact the position has never been filled (2008: 282).
Only a few days before his death, Alex Sanders was visited in his nursing home by a self-styled witch named Kevin Carlyon and his then partner. Drugged on morphine-based painkillers, unable to concentrate or speak properly because he was out of breath, Sanders gave an interview to Carlyon, which he tape-recorded and later sold as an audio cassette for commercial gain. Maxine Sanders described the tapes as “unkind, unedited, and in extremely bad taste.” In her opinion the only reason for selling them was an “act of greed” (Ibid.).
Kevin Carlyon was already a well-known media witch and had set up his own organization called The Covenant of Earth Magic. Like many before him, Carlyon claimed he had hundreds of covens and followers. In the 1980s and 1990s he was involved in a number of high-profile publicity stunts that kept his name in the papers. These included putting a spell on the then British Rail in an attempt to stop them moving the proposed route of the rail link from London to the Channel Tunnel near a prehistoric burial chamber in Kent. In 1990 in another magical working, Carlyon and his coven burned effigies of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, their local MP, and the local mayor. This ritual was carried at a site above the Long Man of Wilmington hill figure, used by many Wiccans and traditional witches and where Maxine Sanders had scattered Alex’s ashes. The media eventually tired of Kevin Carlyon’s publicity-seeking antics and began to ignore him.
Derek Taylor attempted to prolong his teacher’s magical work with trance and spirit communication. He also continued the magical work of the Ordine Della Nova with a small group of friends. Allegedly, he amazed everyone he met with his extraordinary psychic abilities and was supposed to have been employed by the British Secret Service to take part in “remote viewing” experiments. After his marriage broke up, Taylor became more reclusive, and he eventually committed suicide. The circumstances are shrouded in mystery, but it is supposed to have happened during a ritual on a Sussex beach with a man called Robert Truelove. He told police Taylor had seen a UFO mother ship out at sea and waded into the waves in an attempt to reach it. However the current was too strong, and he was swept away and drowned. The police regarded his death as suspicious, but no charges were ever brought in connection with it.
Oddly enough, Maxine Sanders has described how late one night, while in a depressed state Alex had gone down to the beach in Bexhill. Despite the fact he could not swim, he had walked into the sea. The waters closed over his head and an undercurrent carried him away from shore until he lost consciousness. He came to, lying on the beach at dawn, covered in seaweed and pieces of driftwood. Alex remarked to Maxine: “Even the sea rejected me and spat me out” (2008: 235).
At the end of the 1980s, the first book to examine Wicca in Britain from an anthropological prospective was published. This was Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Present-Day England by Tanya Luhrmann (1989), and it provided a snapshot of the Wiccan community as it was at the time, primarily in the London area, and its overlap with ritual magic and other neopagan traditions. Dr. Lurhmann was an American academic who graduated in 1981 from Harvard and then gained a Master of Philosophy degree at Cambridge University and her PhD in 1989. When she wrote the book she was a senior research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
The roots of the book lay in a doctoral thesis on social anthropology. It was controversial because she had gone undercover, joining various Wiccan covens and magical groups and socializing with their members. She conducted interviews with her subjects, read books, became initiated, learned how to read tarot cards and astrological birth charts, and even led rituals (Luhrmann 1989: 17). However, Dr. Lurhmann upset many practitioners by her unsympathetic approach. She said she was interested in the witchcraft revival and why some people got involved in it rather than others, and the reason that allows them to “accept outlandish, apparently irrational, beliefs” (Ibid., 7). Despite her practical experiences in covens and lodges, she seems to have remained a skeptic about the reality of the magic.
Although pseudonyms were used throughout the book, anyone involved in the London occult scene or further afield would have instantly recognized those described. Dr. Luhrmann’s first contact was Jean Williams (aka Elen Williams) and her partner Zachary Cox, who were described as leading “the oldest coven in England, having inherited it from the man who essentially created witchcraft as it is practiced in this country” (Ibid., 21). Williams and Cox were also involved in a Cabbalistic group practicing the Western Mysteries, ran the Neopantheist Society and the Rainbow Bridge, and organized private performances of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass for invited guests. They also published a radical and controversial occult magazine, Aquarian Arrow, in the 1970s and 1980s. Williams is still active in the Pagan Federation London branch today. Another of Dr. Luhrmann’s early contacts was Freya Aswynn, a Dutch woman. She is now best known for her books on the Norse runes, but in the 1980s she was the High Priestess of a Wiccan coven.
It is obvious from Dr. Luhrmann’s research and experiences that at the time there was a considerable overlap between the membership of Wiccan covens and ceremonial magical lodges in the British capital. She also encountered some covens that “emphasize creativity and collectivity, values commonly found in that political perspective, and their rituals are quite different from those in Gardnerian groups” (Ibid., 52). She described one ritual at a prehistoric burial chamber known as the Coldrum Stones in Kent attended by fifteen women. One of them was delegated to draw up the basic outline of the ritual and admitted she had “cobbled together something from Starhawk and Z. Budapest.” This site was also popular with Gardnerian covens, as it was in the countryside within easy reach of the city.
An important aspect of Dr. Luhrmann’s anthropological research survey was the social status and personality traits of the modern practitioners of witchcraft and ritual magic she encountered. This was an aspect that was also taken up by later academics exploring the subject. She soon discovered that the claims by some sociologists that people were drawn to marginal groups because of socio-economic factors was not correct in the case of Wicca. However she was able to identify and isolate certain basic emotional tendencies among its practitioners. These included imaginative absorption and a desire for self-control and to dominate and control the world around them. There was also a possible regression to a child-like state involving dreams and fantasy. One witch whom Dr. Lurhmann met seemed to exist in her own self-contained imaginative inner world that was a “narcissistic reality distanced from the pragmatics of the world around her” (Ibid., 103–104). However, she did concede that the majority of Wiccans she knew were creative, intelligent people from middle-class social backgrounds who held down responsible jobs.
Although Dr. Tanya Luhrmann’s research into Wicca in the 1980s was mostly based on covens, she recognized that the majority of people who described themselves as witches were solitary or solo practitioners. Many of the old-guard Gardnerians firmly believed a witch could only be made by another witch. They rejected the idea of hereditary witches or the controversial issue of so-called self-initiation, or more correctly with self-dedication. Doreen Valiente, as in many things, broke the mol
d and defied this view when she published her Liber Umbranum: A Book of Shadows in 1978. This was a set of rituals specifically designed for the solo witch and included “The Rite of Self-Initiation” (1978: 159–163). Predictably, it was not generally welcomed or accepted by many of the more conservative members of Wicca.
In the United States, the leading exponent of solitary witchcraft in the late 1980s and 1990s was Scott Cunningham (1956–1993). Cunningham’s father, a freelance writer, taught his son the art of writing and helped him make contacts in the publishing world. Before writing his first book on magically related subjects, Magical Herbalism (Llewellyn 1982), Cunningham produced romantic novels under a female pen name, Western paperbacks as “Dick Fletcher,” and even articles for the Canadian Forest Industries magazine. However, it was not until his book Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was published that Cunningham became established as a leading writer on the Craft.
Scott Cunningham first encountered witchcraft as a teenager while watching a television movie called Burn, Witch, Burn. In high school he met a fellow drama class student, Dorothy Jones, who at fifteen was two years older than him. She told Cunningham she was initiated into a Wiccan tradition at puberty, which seems unlikely, but may have been true. She used the witch name “Morgan,” called herself a “moon priestess,” and became Cunningham’s magical teacher after initiating him into the Craft. However, in an appendix written by Dorothy Jones in a biography of Scott Cunningham published after his death from cancer and complications from AIDS, it was revealed the two high school students only shared an intellectual friendship and an interest in herbs, which they gathered on walks together. They did not know to call themselves “pagans” until they picked up a book on the occult at a local supermarket check-out counter (Harrington and Regula 1996).
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