The King of the Witches
While the media in the 1950s had dubbed Gerald Gardner the “Witch King of Britain” in their stories about Wicca, it was Alex Sanders who was destined to make this nonexistent title a reality. In 1965, Sanders hit the headlines when he and eighteen-year-old Maxine Morris went through a handfasting ceremony. Maxine had quickly advanced from neophyte to the rank of High Priestess in the emerging Alexandrian Craft, and she presided over the rituals at Alderley Edge in Cheshire. However, one of the members of the coven was in contact with journalists working for the local newspapers in Manchester and they paid him for details of the location of the meetings (Maxine Sanders 2008: 79).
Subsequently, a reporter turned up at an open evening held by the coven for new enquirers and asked a lot of questions about devil worship and sex orgies. Unbeknown to Maxine Sanders, her husband guessed he was a journalist and agreed that he and a photographer should secretly witness the coven’s next full moon ceremony at Alderley. Neither Maxine nor the rest of the group were aware of this arrangement, and during the “Drawing Down the Moon” rite she saw a glimpse of lights out of the corner of her eye and heard a clicking sound. The young girl naively believed this was some kind of paranormal manifestation and the sign of an impending spiritual experience.
Two days later Maxine was sadly disillusioned when a banner headline in the local Comet newspaper read “Ex-Convent Girl in Witchcraft Rites.” Accompanying the article was a photograph of a naked young woman, whose modesty was only covered by her long blonde hair, and Maxine recognized herself. She has said this was the first of many newspaper stories containing “sensationalised versions of the religious ceremonies I considered sacred” (Ibid., 80). Many years later the editor of the News of the World told her the “Sanders witches were a godsend when news was thin on the ground.” In the 1960s and 1970s, stories about witchcraft always provided a sales boost for the tabloid papers and increased their circulation when they were published.
Maxine felt betrayed by the trick Alex Sanders had played on her and the rest of the coven. As a result of the publicity, her mother nearly had a nervous breakdown and tried to have Maxine exorcised by a Catholic priest, her landlady threatened to evict her, she was questioned by the police, and she lost her job. When she confronted Sanders about the situation, he justified his actions by saying if the Craft was to grow, the public should know it was not an evil cult. It was a religion that did not practice devil worship, but worshipped the Old Gods of Britain. He said there were many people seeking initiation who had no way to find a teacher or a coven. It was therefore essential witchcraft got publicity in the media so it could reach these seekers. Maxine says she was so in love with this charismatic older man at the time she would have forgiven him anything, so she willingly accepted this explanation. Doreen Valiente in fact criticized Sanders for preferring initiates who were young and inexperienced and would believe anything he told them. He often recruited teenagers and departed from the strict rule laid down by Gerald Gardner, who Valiente claimed would not accept anyone into the Craft who was under twenty-one years old.
The rituals practiced in the Sanders coven mixed Gardnerian Wicca from the Book of Shadows he had obtained with Cabbalistic material (largely drawn from the books of the Hermetic occultist and magician Franz Bardon and the Key of Solomon), and ancient Egyptian rituals from The Book of the Dead. Doreen Valiente suggested that Alexandrian Wicca had this eclectic approach because Sanders possessed a limited knowledge of witchcraft (1989: 170). In fact it is more likely it was because he had practiced as a ceremonial magician before he was initiated into Wicca (see Johns 1969 and Maxine Sanders 2008).
In later years, Sanders added to this exotic mix angelic magic derived from the correspondence course issued by Madeline Montalban and her Order of the Morning Star. It is unclear how he obtained this, although Maxine Sanders says he was sent copies through the mail (2008: 237). An alternative version says Sanders was walking down a street in London one day when a stranger thrust a parcel into his hands and rushed off. When he opened the package he found copies of the OMS angelic magic course in it. Maxine says that in the 1970s she finally visited Madeline Montalban, and belatedly asked her permission to use the courses in the training of her initiates.
The June Johns biography of Alex Sanders claims that in 1965 he received an invitation to a party from one of the 1,623 witches who belonged to his covens. It is very doubtful that this large number was correct, and traditionally there has always been a tendency among media witches and self-styled leaders of the Craft to exaggerate the number of covens they command. On arrival at the house where the party was to be held, Sanders was led into the drawing room where the members of five covens, totaling sixty-five people, were waiting to greet him. Draped over a chair was a robe of dark blue velvet and Sanders was told it had been made especially for him. When he said he had no need for a new robe, Sanders was told it had been made following a special conference of all the other covens. As a result the “elders” had come to the conclusion that, since he was their founder and the only hereditary witch among their number, they wanted to crown him as the King of the Witches. This would, he was told, be a formal acknowledgment of his position as the foremost authority in the country on witchcraft (Johns 1969: 101).
Apparently, Sanders was not keen to accept the honor being bestowed on him by his own initiates. He saw no reason because in matters of ritual and dogma his authority had never been questioned by his covens. Usually the High Priest of a coven solved most of the problems that might arise and it was only the ones he could not deal with that were passed to Sanders for judgment. It was pointed out that his authority had been challenged. A disgruntled coven member had sent him a written curse because she objected to his references to witchcraft in public and his claim it was compatible with other religions. Only Sanders’ confidence in his ability to banish the curse and protect his wife and followers had prevented widespread panic among the covens.
In the end, Johns said, Sanders was reluctantly persuaded to become the king of the covens he had founded. He put on the new robe made for him to wear during the crowning ceremony, which was based on the coronation of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. The coven elders placed a crown made from brass, copper, silver, and velvet cloth on the witch king’s head. They then anointed his bare feet with perfumed oil and sat him on a throne before the altar as the living representative of the Horned God. At the end of the ceremony the crown was thrown into a cauldron containing a fire so the oath of allegiance Sanders had taken as the King of the Witches would be binding for all of eternity (Ibid., 103).
Maxine Sanders, however, has given a rather different version of the event in one of her autobiographies. She said that one day among the sackfuls of mail the couple received from all over the world was a letter written in “a priestly manner.” It said the Craft was in need of a leader to take it from the days of persecution into the New Age of Aquarius. The letter went on to say that the Elders of the Craft had met in council and decided Alex Sanders would be this leader. At first Sanders reacted with pride and then he laughed and dismissed the letter as a hoax. In the days following the receipt of the letter he thought about the offer and decided if it was authentic then the person required would be a better man than he was. Also whoever took the title King of the Witches would become the sacrificial divine king and that role was something he was not willing to take on.
Allegedly, a week later an “odd-looking man” arrived at the Sanders’ home. He was in his mid-thirties, ex-public school educated and well dressed, with an overbearing and pompous manner. After he was served tea, he asked to speak to Mr. Sanders alone, and Maxine was annoyed she had been so summarily dismissed by this stranger. After the man left, Sanders stayed in his room. When he finally emerged he announced to his wife and the curious coven members that the mysterious visitor was a representative of the so-called Council of Craft Elders who had sent the letter. The man had delivered another letter from the group that Sanders had been reading and rereading since he left. It requested Sanders take on the task and honor of accepting the kingship of the Craft.
Sanders was evidently giving the matter some further thought when a smartly dressed woman turned up, claiming to be another messenger from the shadowy Council of Elders. She said she had been sent to ask Sanders a third time if he would accept the crown they were offering and take the official title of King of the Witches. Sanders at first replied he was not worthy and had “broken the laws of the Craft” (Maxine Sanders 2008: 117). Finally he agreed, and the time and place for the coronation ceremony was agreed upon.
It was held two months after this last meeting with a representative of the Council at the house of one of Sanders’ witches in Didsbury near Manchester. Two rooms had been cleared of everyday furniture and thirteen throne-like chairs were placed in a semi-circle around a simple stool. These chairs were for the thirteen “witch queens” of the alleged 127 covens Sanders had founded, including Maxine Sanders, and the stool was for him to sit on during the rite. After a purification ritual Sanders entered the room wearing a plain dark robe. He was anointed with sacred aromatic oils and redressed in a white linen gown. The actual ceremony was performed by an officiating priest, who Maxine Sanders says was in his twenties, so he could hardly have been a member of the Council of Elders. An older woman did the actual crowning of Sanders, consecrating him as King of the Witches, and giving him the new witch name, “Verbuis.”
Predictably, the media soon picked up on the title, or were alerted to it by Sanders, and the Gardnerians reacted to it badly. In May 1966, having failed to persuade Sanders to stop his publicity antics, Eleanor Bone joined forces with Patricia Crowther and, with the encouragement of Jack Bracelin, publicly denounced Sanders as an imposter who did not have the proper initiation credentials. Sanders eventually conceded that the title of King of the Witches was an honorary one referring only to his position of authority and leadership over his own covens. It was not meant, as the media had stated, to suggest he had any authority over any other witches who did not belong to what became known as the Alexandrian Wiccan tradition.
Every seven years from his original coronation as witch king, Sanders organized a ceremony to be re-crowned. This reflected the alleged connection between the role and the ancient concept of the divine king sacrificed after reigning for seven years. His blood was spilled on the land to ensure the continued fertility of the lands and a plentiful harvest. I was invited to one of these re-crowning ceremonies held in the tiny basement apartment in Bayswater, West London, where the couple had moved to from Manchester in 1967. It was a hot summer’s day and the place was crowded with members of Sanders’ coven and invited guests. The actual ceremony took place out of sight in another room to which the outsiders present were not invited.
At the end of the ritual, which took about an hour as I remember it, although it seemed longer, Alex Sanders made a dramatic entrance into the room where we were patiently waiting. He was dressed in a theatrical costume as an ancient Egyptian pharaoh complete with heavy black eye make-up, a double crown, and what looked like heavy satin robes. He held a scourge and a crooked wand in his hands. The witches present lined up to give their allegiance to the reborn King of the Witches by kissing a ring with a large stone setting which he wore on a finger. I was invited to follow suit, but refused, as I did not recognize the title or his authority.
Following his original anointing as the King of the Witches, Alex Sanders began to peddle the grandiose fantasy that he was directly descended from real royalty. He claimed that one of his Welsh ancestors was Owain Glyndwr, the medieval rebel prince who led an uprising against the rule of Wales by the English. He also confided in his followers that Glyndwr had been a member of the Craft and a former holder of the title of King of the Witches. Needless to say, there is no historical evidence to support any of these claims.
Not content with claiming his grandmother was a Wiccan, in one of the lectures Sanders gave to his students he told them witchcraft originated on the lost continent of Atlantis. According to Sanders, King Arthur and Merlin came from Lyonesse, or Atlantis, “where the Great White Mother had her power and [which] was the site of the Garden of Eden.” With the imminent destruction of Atlantis, the Great Goddess chose a few initiates to transmit the ancient wisdom (Wicca) to “the younger races” of the planet. These “chosen ones” left the island before its destruction and traveled to Britain, Greece, Egypt, and even the Americas, where they founded mystery schools. The first ships to escape the cataclysm arrived in Britain bearing Arthur, Merlin, and Morgan. They made landfall in Wales and established what is now known as witchcraft (Alex Sanders 1984: 31–36).
In the meantime, while Jack Bracelin had been encouraging Ray Bone and Pat Crowther to challenge Sanders’ authenticity in public, he was involved in more material matters behind the scenes. In 1966, he attempted to sell off the land at the Five Acres Naturist Club for building. Two members of the British Parliament, one of whom was allegedly a member of the Craft, promised to help Bracelin in his efforts to sell the property by getting planning permission passed for the land. This would have increased its value and raised the selling price. Apparently Bracelin’s grand plan was to use the sale proceeds to launch a new witchcraft magazine to replace Pentagram and buy a large house in the fashionable county of Berkshire. The idea was to open the house and grounds as a witchcraft center and a naturist club exclusively for witches (DV notebook entry dated March 30, 1966, in MOW archive). Unfortunately the idea came to nothing.
In 1967, the Sanderses decided to leave Manchester and move to London as caretakers of a large house in Clanicarde Gardens in West London. This was owned by a Greek friend of one of their coven members and was split into individual bedsitters. At the time Maxine Sanders says their coven in Manchester consisted of only six members, but when they arrived in London it was in the middle of the so-called hippie summer of love. When word got out of their arrival, the flower children began to descend on the apartment, seeking spiritual enlightenment and initiation into witchcraft. The front room was turned into a temporary camping site with people in sleeping bags all over the floor (Maxine Sanders 2008: 129).
Every day the small apartment filled up with young people seeking counseling. Many of these were runaways from home or drug addicts—perhaps the reason Doreen Valiente commented that Sanders attracted the younger generation to his coven. However, because of a fear of adverse publicity, no drugs were allowed to be used on the premises. Open meetings were held each Friday evening, during which Sanders taught practical magic, often using techniques derived without credit from Franz Bardon’s books. Free food was provided to those who wanted it, using discarded vegetables from a nearby street market. Sanders made pies decorated with pastry fertility symbols, and pans of vegetarian curry were always ready on the cooker.
Although their relationship had been cemented in a witches’ handfasting in Manchester, at Beltane 1968, Maxine and Alex Sanders were legally married in a civil ceremony at Kensington Registry Office. The only people present were the Greek landlord who was their employer and a gardener from the local Kensington Gardens, who both acted as witnesses. Their four-month-old daughter was left with one of the tenants of the boarding house, a Maltese striptease artist with gangland connections. After the wedding ceremony they returned to their apartment for a reception of digestive biscuits washed down with a bottle of champagne donated by their employer (Maxine Sanders 2008: 139).
Although the couple had initially attempted in their dealings with the press to promote a positive image of modern witchcraft, sometimes without success, the Sunday newspapers were still only interested in publishing sensational stories about ‘black magic’ and devil worship. In 1969, they were given the opportunity again when Charles Pace contacted The News of the World and offered to expose the witches he knew for payment. As the High Priest of Ray Bone’s coven in Streatham, South London, Pace knew everybody in the contemporary Wiccan scene, including the Sanderses. Pace was something of a hypocrite, as in a letter to Cecil Williamson in October 1963 he denounced as “rubbish” a series of sensational articles on witchcraft published the previous month in the News of the World. He said he was going to deal with the reporters concerned, Peter Earle and Noyes Thomas, by challenging them to a “magical battle” at Candlemas 1964 (letter dated October 18, 1963, doc. 172/ref. 193 in MOW archive).
During the 1960s and 1970s, witches were often approached by representatives of national newspapers offering them large sums of money for their stories. While I was working at RCA Records in Curzon Street in Central London in the 1970s, one of my colleagues revealed that he was a member of Sanders’ coven. He told me he had been contacted several times by newspapers offering payment for an exposé of what happened during coven meetings. They were particularly interested in the possibility that such meetings involved kinky sex orgies. My informant was told that even if they were quite innocent it did not matter, as he could invent the stories and still get paid. Although he was tempted by the considerable amounts being offered, to his credit he declined all their offers, as he did not want to betray his initiators. Others were not so loyal.
The 1969 exposé included my own Wiccan “grandmother,” Celia Penny (witch name “Francesca”), and the articles were published in the News of the World over several weeks. Over that period the headlines to the articles changed from “Black Magic—an evil exposed” to “Witchcraft—an evil exposed.” Because the Sanders held open meetings for newcomers, it was very easy for journalists to infiltrate them. One posing as a multimillionaire chicken farmer aroused Maxine Sanders’ suspicions because he kept asking peculiar questions. Her fears were realized when he turned out to be working for the News of the World. In the story he wrote about the coven, it was described as a “satanic witch cult,” and edited conversations between the witches were published that had been secretly tape-recorded without their knowledge.
Charles Pace used his extensive contacts with members of the Wiccan movement in London to introduce undercover reporters to the witches he knew. One of these was the late Madge Worthington, High Priestess of the Whitecroft Gardnerian tradition, named after the road in Beckenham, Kent, where her High Priest, the late Arthur Eaglen, lived. Madge received an enquiry from a Roman Catholic priest who wanted to be initiated into Wicca. She had telephoned my Gardnerian initiator, Rosina Bishop, asking for her advice and was told to have nothing to do with him. Unfortunately she ignored this advice and a meeting was set up in a London hotel with the priest, which was secretly recorded by a reporter. The cleric was not really interested in Wicca, but wanted to attend a Black Mass and deflower virgin girls. The story was published in the News of the World together with a photograph of a surprised Madge Worthington standing on the doorstep of her riverside house in Chiswick, West London. The story claimed that her husband knew nothing about her involvement in witchcraft.
In a strange way, the newspaper stories had a perversely positive effect, despite the damage they did to the private lives of several of those who were exposed in them. Always after such sensational stories appeared in the press the publicly known figures in the Craft received increased mail from enquirers. Most came from people asking how they could join a coven. On the downside, these people often had ulterior motives. Like the Catholic priest who had contacted the Whitecroft Coven, many of them were hoping Wicca rites involved sex orgies. In fact, the Sheffield Coven refused to accept single men for initiation as a method of screening out those just looking for sexual thrills.
Some years earlier, Alex Sanders had acted as a consultant on the movie Eye of the Devil starring David Niven and the young American actress, Sharon Tate. She was the wife of film producer Roman Polanski, who in 1968 produced the classic film Rosemary’s Baby starring Mia Farrow, about a cult of modern devil worshippers in New York. In August 1969, the media reported a “ritual murder” had taken place in the Hollywood hills. Several people were killed in horrible circumstances, including Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time. It was discovered by the police that members of a gang called The Family, led by Charles Manson, an ex-convict and self-styled spiritual guru, had carried out the murders. The group had a commune in the Californian desert and was involved in supplying drugs to wealthy Hollywood movie stars.
There were also unconfirmed allegations in the media that Manson had connections with an OTO lodge in California and a sinister group known as The Process founded by two ex-Scientologists. They had a branch in London with a coffee-bar that was frequented by well-known occultists in the capital including Madeline Montalban and members of her Order of the Morning Star, and the Sanderses. It has been widely alleged, but often denied, that during his time on the film set of Eye of the Devil Alex Sanders actually initiated Sharon Tate into Wicca.
A more positive development in December 1969 was a meeting between Alex Sanders and a journalist named Stewart Farrar (1916–2000), who later went on to write novels, screenplays, and television scripts. Farrar was sent by the popular weekly magazine Reveille to attend the press review of an X-rated documentary film called Legend of the Witches, starring Alex and Maxine Sanders. It caused controversy, and still does, because it featured Sanders sacrificing a live chicken, performing a Black Mass, and taking part in a mock orgy. In an interview with the UK pagan magazine Pentacle in October 2007, Maxine Sanders said she was opposed to the sacrifice, but it went ahead anyway. At the time, the film was denounced by Wiccans, and when a video of it was shown at a private screening at the witchcraft museum in Boscastle a few years ago, some members of the audience protested at its showing.
Following the press review, Stewart Farrar visited the Sanderses’ apartment to interview them. He was so intrigued by what they had to say about witchcraft he attended one of their open meetings and was invited to a skyclad circle. In the subsequent article he wrote, Farrar said Sanders had told him there were ten degrees of initiation into Wicca. From the description he gave, they seem to be related to the grades used by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and illustrated Sanders’ interest in ritual magic. Sanders also dismissed Gerald Gardner as merely a first-degree witch who had invented his rituals. He added that he regarded the Gardnerians as “mere beginners—genuine witches, but only of the first grade” (Farrar January 10, 1970).
Stewart Farrar had already been interested in the occult through his friendship with the Golden Dawn magician and writer Francis King and his partner Isabel Sutherland, the deputy editor of the encyclopedic part-work Man, Myth and Magic, in the 1970s. At Farrar’s meeting with the Sanders, he had suddenly realized that Wicca was the spiritual path he wanted to follow. In turn, Alex Sanders had been pleased with the positive angle of the article he had written and as a result asked Farrar to write a book about Alexandrian Wicca. He agreed and this was published in 1971 under the title of What Witches Do. Some of its Gardnerian critics waspishly claimed it should really have been entitled What Some Witches Do.
While Alex was researching the book, he and Maxine invited Stewart Farrar to become a witch and be initiated into their coven. He accepted the offer because he believed it would help the writing of the book to have an insider’s view. He was duly initiated at the February full moon in 1970. Shortly afterwards, a young woman named Janet Owen, who was working for A&M Records, joined the Sanderses’ coven. Stewart Farrar first met her when Alex Sanders was recording an album called A Witch is Born. He was taking the photographs for the sleeve and performing the voiceover on the record while Janet Owen was acting as an initiate on it. Eventually he and Janet were to get married, break away from the Sanderses’ coven, form their own, and move from London to rural Ireland.
Whether Stewart Farrar believed Sanders’ story that he inherited his Book of Shadows from his Welsh grandmother is not known. However in What Witches Do he wrote that while he had never seen one, he believed the Gardnerian version of the BoS was substantially the same as the one used by the Alexandrian covens (Farrar 1971: 34). He also told friends that Sanders was actively bisexual and even had a boyfriend during the time he was married to Maxine, which she did not like (Guerra 2008: 100). This is why they eventually divorced, and another reason why the homophobic Gardnerians were opposed to him. In fact, Stewart and Janet Farrar were among the first prominent Wiccans to say there was nothing wrong with gay people joining covens, although Stewart did have reservations about all male or all-female covens because of problems with the gender polarity of Wiccan rites.
The News of the World exposé had farcical repercussions when Alex Sanders appeared on a short-lived chat show on London Weekend Television in March 1970 called The Simon Dee Show. During the program he mentioned the newspaper articles and produced a wax image depicting Charles Pace, who Sanders said was the person responsible for the exposé and a traitor to the Craft. He then proceeded, on live television, to stab the poppet several times with pins. He boasted that the end result of this cursing ritual would be that Pace would suffer a heart attack. Apparently it did not work and was one of Sanders’ publicity stunts, as a few days later the two men were seen happily drinking together in a London public house. Shortly afterwards, the chat show host, Simon Dee, lost his job and vanished into obscurity—blamed by some on the so-called “death ritual.”
Doreen Valiente said that as a result of the News of the World articles and Alex Sanders’ theatrical performance on television, some people in political power decided legal action should be taken to curb witchcraft activities. Gwilym Roberts, a Labour politician and Member of Parliament, actually raised the matter in the House of Commons in April 1970. He asked the then Home Secretary to introduce new legislation at the earliest opportunity against anyone who claimed to practice witchcraft. Valiente decided to arrange a meeting with the MP to discuss the matter and he invited her to tea at the Commons. She was surprised to find he was not a religious bigot and was only responding to letters he had received from concerned voters. After a long talk, the politician agreed to drop his call for new legislation to deal with what he now realized was the media-created “evil menace of witchcraft” (Valiente 1989: 80).
Despite his problems with negative publicity, Alex Sanders went out of his way to court it. It was alleged he had an affair with “possibly the most famous rock star in history” (Deutch 1977: 102), and was certainly fascinating by rock groups. In 1968, the manager of the heavy metal band Black Widow contacted him about a joint project. They were rehearsing a musical drama about a magician who summons up the demon Ashtaroth, previously an ancient pagan goddess. One of the members of Sanders’ coven volunteered to play the role of the goddess, naked except for body paint depicting a serpent coiled around her body. However, when she fell ill, Sanders volunteered his wife Maxine to play the role instead and invited the press to attend the performance.
When June Johns’ biography of the King of the Witches was published in 1969, a theater producer suggested a stage production featuring witchcraft rites might be an interesting, and presumably commercial, venture. Sanders obtained permission from Black Widow to adapt a version of their show to be performed in front of an audience made up of the paying public. Unfortunately the first performance went awry as the press photographers caused a delay to the start that upset the audience, and the theater manager had to deal with Christians demonstrating outside against the show. The London fire brigade were also standing by because of the risk from burning candles and incense, and Maxine Sanders realized the other participants in the “ritual [were] mumbling, stage-frightened incompetents” (2008: 157).
Despite this initial disaster, the show went on the road and was performed at various public venues all over southern England. Further problems followed, and during one performance in Poole, Dorset, a drunken man climbed on to the stage, as he wanted to get close to one of the female witches. Sanders was forced to push him off the stage using a candlestick with iron prongs, causing the man to bleed profusely (Ibid., 158). At another performance a ritual was performed in a cinema to call up the demon Asmodeus. When he refused to put in an appearance the disgruntled audience besieged the stage demanding their money back. Ignoring these incidents, the show went on in the true show business tradition and performances were held at night-clubs in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset and at the Civic Center in Barnsley, Yorkshire (Crowther 1998: 73).
In 1971, the Sanderses decided to look for a second home in the countryside outside London. One of their witches lived in the small village of Selmeston in Sussex on the south coast and they managed to rent a cottage there. The house was converted from a pair of farm workers’ dwellings, and was large enough for several people to live in. It also had a garden suitable both for outdoor rituals and for growing flowers and vegetables. Maxine Sanders seems to have enjoyed the horticultural opportunities provided by the cottage garden, as she became a “fanatical gardener” during her time living in Selmeston (2008: 165).
Selmeston was a village boasting an ancient Saxon church built on a mound with a circular churchyard, suggesting it was once a pagan site of worship. Alex Sanders later discovered it was once the shrine of a Celtic water goddess. To the south of the churchyard was a paddock where Sanders thought he saw ancient druids walking among the trees. He soon realized the church mound and its burial ground were points of earth energy, connected by a ley line to the hill figure of the Long Man of Wilmington, which had been used as a ritual working site by Robert Cochrane’s coven in the 1960s, an Iron Age hill fort at Mount Caburn, and the famous Pook Hill immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his famous children’s book Puck of Pook Hill (Sinha, Samhain 1979).
Maxine Sanders claimed the cottage had been built on the site of a Roman barracks—villagers told her they had seen the ghostly figures of centurions marching down the lane outside it (Maxine Sanders 2008: 165). Alex was busy having his own visions, including one of a “tall, dour looking individual [who came] sailing through the wall” of the cottage. He introduced himself as Cardoc, the “priest and guardian of the ancient dead,” and told Sanders the building stood on a high place where in olden times a tower stood watch over the burial ground. When Sanders did some research, he found the local museum in Lewes housed the remains of five Saxon warriors that had been unearthed from the cottage garden, complete with their swords, shields, and helmets (Sinha, Samhain 1979).
The population of Selmeston was made up a few locals with mostly wealthy incomers who commuted to nearby towns or London to work. Maxine Sanders said the village was divided between Roman Catholics and Church of England Protestants. As soon as the Sanderses moved in, residents united in a discussion of whether they wanted “the witches” living in the village. The older inhabitants accepted the newcomers, and notes were posted through the letterbox of the cottage addressed to “Mrs. Witch,” asking for help (Maxine Sanders 2008: 166).
The witches from the Sanders coven who had remained behind in West London attended meetings at the weekends in Sussex and participated in the regular rituals held on the surrounding Sussex Downs. At the same time a new coven was forming around Sanders. This consisted of people who came down from London, and locals from nearby towns such as Brighton and Eastbourne. This new group began working with the ley energies to “wake up the power of the hills,” as one member put it.
At first during the winter the coven met in the large sitting room of the cottage, but when spring came they started to convene outside. It seemed like “a scene from a medieval woodcut: the witches’ fire, the crude altar with wild flowers, naked bodies through the shadows, lonely flute music, and the little drum” (Sinha, Samhain 1979). Sanders had discovered his primitive self and he “traveled across country in the tireless lope of the savage. In the Middle Ages this odd gait, stooped forward with arms hanging loosely and knees drawn up to the chest, may have given rise to the werewolf legend, but it covered enormous tracts of ground” (Ibid.).
This romantic description of life at Selmeston hid the fact that trouble was brewing between the Sanderses. Maxine had noticed the level of training was less intense in the new coven and Alex was not so demanding that its members exercise their personal skills. She also noticed an “awkward atmosphere that should not have existed in a healthy coven.” The situation came to a head after Sanders brought in a young gay man whom she disliked on sight. To her concern, when the young man was initiated, Sanders invited his mother and her boyfriend to witness the rite.
Because they could not afford to keep two homes running, the Sanderses returned to London, and Maxine decided she no longer wanted to hold the position of “Witch Queen” to the Alexandrian covens. In 1972, she retired from that position and ritually burnt her garters, robe, and the many crowns acquired over years in the role. At about the same time her husband began to treat her in a derogatory and demeaning way. Finally he announced he was in love with one of the male witches in the coven and wanted him to move in with them. Maxine refused to accept this new situation. After a violent scene, Alex and his new lover moved back to Sussex, leaving Maxine alone in London with their children, and taking solace in alcohol (Maxine Sanders 2008: 166–169).