#Alexandrian Traditon

[dragonkibbleiinmycauldron]

Greetings!

I am a novice witch who's still finding his footing in Witchcraft and Wicca. My influences come from Hermeticism and the Western Esoteric Traditions. I consider myself a Neopagan, and I'm drawn to Alexandrian Wicca.

This blog is less a personal grimoir and more an image board of thoughts, reflections, witch aesthetic and research.

About me

Gay Gemini ♊️ in his thirties. I love being out and about with my husband and two great dogs. I'm a firm believer in self growth and a practitioner of meditation and yoga. Also got a foot/paw in the furry fandom.

Blessed be!

[tyetknot]

King of the Witches - A Review |  Chapter Five - Bewitched

King of the Witches Chapter Five – Bewitched

Introduction | 1 - The Young Initiate | 2 - A Magic Childhood | 3 - The Haunted Hill | 4 - Call Down The Spirits | 5 - Bewitched

This update will be rather more robust and full-bodied than several others, because this chapter was overflowing with Shit That Didn’t Happen and is eminently quotable. There is some bonkers shit in here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The year is 1953. Two days after performing his Shrove Tuesday Rite of Ineffable Evil we find Sanders selling formulae from his old job to someone looking to set up as a pharmaceutical supplier (copyright infringement! evil!)

That evening he discovers while walking evilly through Picadilly Gardens in that Black Magic kind of way that he is being followed by a middle-aged man and woman. He confronts them and they tell him that he is the spinning image of their son who died three years before. They invite him to dinner at their hotel, which he attends, and then to dinner at their own home in Fallowfield, a suburb of Manchester, the next day. Ron and Maud (last names never given, Ron was a stockbroker, their son Kenneth died of meningitis at the age of 20 in [presumably] 1950, the only other descriptor being that they live in a “large old house with enormous bay windows”. I was unable to find any information on these persons after a little bit of searching and it is entirely possible they never existed) take a real liking to Sanders and they repeatedly beg him to come and live with them because he needs someone to look after him. They want him to come and stay, and don’t care that he practices witchcraft. Eventually Sanders relents and moves in.

This seems kind of implausible on the face of it, but I can say from personal experience that sometimes a couple will ‘take in’ a younger person in need – it is how I came to be in my current living situation. However, there are several things about this story that make it clear this is a flight of fancy, which we will now get into.

Sanders lives a life of idleness and Ron and Maud dote on him, giving him anything he wants.

“Each evening, after his friends had gone to bed, he walked the streets until dawn reciting his incantations which, for the first time in his life, seemed to have lost their magic and, in fact, their whole meaning. True, he had acquired a great deal of comfort without having worked for it, but it had not brought him the happiness he had expected.”

One evening his walk takes him past a large and run-down vacant house by the name of Riversdale, on Demesne Road,  which to his shock is exactly the house he had seen in his earlier visions of wealth and luxury. The next morning he takes Ron and Maud to see it, and the caretaker shows them around – it has 26 rooms, among which is a forty-foot-long billiards room in the basement which Sanders had seen in his visions as a ballroom. The caretaker tells them it was built for Lord Egerton of Tatton in 1872. Cursory research on my part suggests this would have been Alan Egerton, 3rd Baron Egerton (1845 – 1920) but I have not been able to find any house named Riversdale. The road does exist, though.

Ron decides to buy the house for Alex and tells him he may live there indefinitely and will receive a regular allowance. Maud would much rather he stay with them, but Ron feels that Sanders needs his independence. They have it repaired and furnished to Sanders’ tastes, although he feels a little bad and worries that he is using them. “Several thousands of pounds went on restoring Riversdale’s solid mahogany staircase, decorating its sixteen bedrooms and painting its exterior.” However, having him around brings happiness to Ron and Maud.

Sanders lives a life of luxury and excess. “Seventeen hand-tailored suits hung in Alex’s wardrobe and two daily women were needed to clean the collection of Georgian silver and polish the antique furniture. Life became one round of gaiety. Each morning he would go into the city where he had joined almost every club. Inevitably, he had taken up drinking, and he would return home at night having drunk most of a bottle of brandy.”

While reading all of this and the pages to come I started wondering what Sanders’ actual parents thought of all of this, but they are not mentioned at all.

The basement billiards room at Riversdale is converted into an opulent ballroom and Sanders paints a magic Circle on the floor. Here he holds elaborate parties for wealthy guests – he has become popular with a particular sort of crowd and begins modeling under the name Paul Dallas. He hangs out with actors and businessmen and preys on lower-class women, makes up spells and potions for his friends, and does not keep staff in the house to ensure privacy for his weird rich people parties. As the evening progresses, most guests were encouraged to leave, while more discrete insiders, perhaps twelve or so couples, remained.

I said “weird rich people parties”. It’s going to get weird. I’m just going to quote the section entirely.

“Alex then showed the guests to their bedrooms and they would all return to the ballroom wearing exotic dressing-gowns. The conventional lighting would give way to coloured lighting (of the type now known as psychedelic). Rainbows flickered across the ceiling, and were reflected in the full-length mirrors that lined the walls. While Alex plied the girls with drinks, his closest friends would drive into the city to collect two or three down-and-outs, offering them a meal and plenty to drink. They seldom refused. As the party progressed, the dressing-downs would be discarded, and any other clothes, until all would be naked. To this wild scene would be introduced the bewildered, tattered strangers. Furnished with liquor and food such as they had not seen in years, they swallowed their scruples along with the provisions, and by the time the next act began they would be too far gone to care. One by one they were led upstairs to the bathrooms where, watched by an audience of half-drunk nudes, they were told to get undressed and have a bath. The filthier the stranger, the more disgusting his clothes and body, the more exciting the occasion. The well-fed guests gasped as the pitiful human carcasses were exposed to their eyes. By now the down-and-outs were usually sobering up and beginning to realize how they had been used. They seldom protested, however, aware, perhaps for the first time, of their own degradation. Silently they would dress and make their escape as fast as possible. To relieve flagging spirits, Alex would then call his fiends back to the ballroom where, with the lights now dimmed, he would set up an altar to worship the devil. Letting the others suggest the ceremony, he would drape a tapestry over the long table on which the food had been laid, and set it with bowls of flowers. Then the devil dance would start, increasing in abandon until a girl climbed on the altar and lay down to be worshipped by the others. Invariably her partner would join her and, urged on by the erotic gathering, they would consummate their passion to applause. Alex joined in the applause as much as the others, and tried to still the shame he felt in his misuse of witchcraft. When the guests had gone to bed he would bring out his athame, describe a witch’s circle, and chant the invocations that might bring him peace. He prayed to the great god to send him someone to love, someone who would love him in return, but not a candle flame would flicker; no breath from the outer world would disturb the incense.”

Not gonna lie, this straight-up sounds like some weird serial killer Eyes Wide Shut shit. Fortunately it’s very unlikely any of this crap happened.

All of this, of course, is paid for by Ron, who suspects nothing and supplies Sanders with money to spend as he pleases. However, people have started to notice him.

“Alex’s sudden affluence did not go entirely unnoticed. His story was, quite simply, that he had been left a fortune. In fact, quite apart from Ron’s disinterested generosity, he was showered with gifts from other men who were endowed with more money and sensuality than common sense. Deviates and perverts competed for his favours. One gave him a house designed after an Italian villa; several gave him valuable jewellery.”

Unfortunately none of this wealth and favour brings him happiness, and when he tries to read the Tarot cards they promise only pain and death in the future. He descends into alcoholism and becomes a hardened drinker, has a string of kept women (eight at one point) and begins to fall into the shadowy and decadent world of covert upper-class homosexuality. Sanders gets invited to parties that have some pretty weird sex shit that makes me think of the Equesticle after-after party from that one episode of Bob’s Burgers, you know the one, which I will also quote here:

“As at Alex’s parties, the fun did not begin until most of the guests had left. The thirty or so who remained taught Alex a number of perversions with which he was unfamiliar. One baronet put on a tight runner suit similar to those worn by frogmen, but with holes cut in various strategic places so that the flesh bulged out, grossly misshapen. Two women fought over the possession of a third, and a group of men rhythmically beat each other’s bare bodies with slender canes. If sex was normal it was too dull for these people; they vied with each other in finding new kicks.”

Entry into the world of rich-people 1950s BDSM brings the change to go to more, fancier parties. Sanders also attracts the attention of the powerful in other ways.

“A magistrate held one week-end party at his house outside Manchester while his wife was away. When the other guests had gone to their rooms, the host invited Alex to his inner sanctum: a small bedroom, the walls and ceiling of which were lined with mirrors set at various angles. As they both lay naked on the narrow bed, thousands of images of every part of their bodies were reflected on all sides.”

A wealthy Italian count takes a liking to Sanders and showers him with gifts and wants him to be exclusive, and when rebuffed with the claim that Sanders is a witch and magician and not to be owned by any man is offered a place in Italy to set up a black magic coven and is sent a box of family jewels. Sanders, to his credit, rejects this offer and returns the jewels. Sanders keeps working his dark spells to ensure a constant supply of cash, but doesn’t want to draw others into that world.

“Playfully praying to the devil to stimulate sexual appetite was one thing, but raising evil forces in all sincerity was quite another.”

I’m going to assume that none of this shit happened, experimenting with homosexuality aside (as we all know, Sanders was bi as all hell), because.....well, because I have a few functioning brain cells left over after all my years posting on this hellsite.

All of this fast living and Black Magickque and drinking and using people  may be fun for now, but eventually the price will have to be paid.

[aroacepagans]

Hey can I ask a question? I’ve been kinda getting into witchcraft lately but the one thing holding me back a little is that I’m not super comfy with how much stuff there is about male/female energy. I know you’re Wiccan so please correct me if I’m wrong but I think I’ve read in reasearching it that most wiccans worship a male and a female god. Idk I just wanted to ask somebody else’s opinion. Thanks!

I am not actually Wiccan, but may parents are both Alexandrian so I know a fair amount about it. 

It’s true that British Traditional Wicca has a heavy focus on male/female energy and worship is centered on the mother goddess and the horned god. That said, if Brit Trad is something that happens to really appeal to you then I know there are a lot of covens who are in the process of trying to re-work outdated practices and rituals in a way that is more inclusive of nonbinary and GNC practitioners, so finding one of these groups may be an option. 

Neo-Wicca has some of these same elements but tends to be a little more flexible when it comes to gender.  I also know a lot of GNC folks who initiate into Wicca specifically so that they can have some more formalized magical training but stop practicing Wicca after they’ve gotten to their preferred point in their learning, so this is also an option. If you really want to be Wiccan, but you aren’t comfortable with the gender aspect of it there are different ways to explore the traditon.

Also, keep in mind that Wicca is not the end all and be all of magic. There are lots of magical traditions and practices that aren’t Wiccan, and most of them are far less gendered. If the appeal of Wicca is simply doing witchcraft then I think it would be worth it for you to research some other magical practices. 

Hope that helps!

[tyetknot]

King of the Witches - A Review |  Chapter Four – Call Down The Spirits

King of the Witches Chapter Four – Call Down The Spirits

Introduction | 1 - The Young Initiate | 2 - A Magic Childhood | 3 - The Haunted Hill | 4 - Call Down The Spirits | 5 - Bewitched

When last we met we looked over Chapter Three, The Haunted Hill, (unrelated to Elvira’s Haunted Hills) where Sanders experiences visions of the Pendle Witches and also gets initiated to the Third Degree by having ritual sex with his grandmother. Why someone would make that story up about themselves and then willingly tell it to other people, I cannot say. Fortunately this chapter is way less fucked up and contains 100% less geriatric incest.

The year is 1943, Alex Sanders is 17, and starts attending Spiritualist meetings, probably because there was a girl there he fancied, and also to see if it had anything in common with witchcraft. I expect that the connection here is the visions he allegedly had on Pendle Hill.  He started training under them to be a medium but was covertly using witchcraft to obtain visions and perform healings through laying-on of hands. His talents in this area bring more people in to the Spiritualist church, which becomes quite large. One issue was communication with the dead: he was apparently uncomfortable with this because it was too close to necromancy “to which witches object”, although precisely how this is different from his earlier attempts to raise his grandmother’s shade I cannot say.

At work he met a young lady, Doreen (no, not St. Doreen, a different one),  and they got married on July 17, 1948. He was 22, she was 19. According to the book the marriage was basically doomed from the start, with Sanders feeling trapped and worried about his lack of advancement prospects, low wages and a baby on the way. He can’t work magic to advance in his field because witches cannot work alone (there’s that idea again) and Doreen has no idea he is a witch anyway. This point is contradicted by other Sanders material, such as interviews where he comments that she disliked his unusual religious practices, especially that of working in the nude. Confusingly he has visions of himself being wealthy and successful, wearing fine clothes amid glamourous friends in a splendid ballroom, but once again visions of death as well – this time of a woman.

His medical lab work gives him the opportunity to compare industrial formulae with those of witchcraft recipes which sometimes leaves the industrial items wanting, and is unaware that his marriage is falling apart, with his wife spending much time at her mother’s. Along comes baby Paul, and three years later baby Janice who was born with a twisted foot. The doctor says this can be corrected but it would be best to wait until she was 13 or 14, but Sanders works some magic to find out what to do, and is told to rub olive oil into the joint, which he then manipulates back into place. Good as new!

Sadly this miraculous recovery does nothing to help the failing marriage, until one day when he was 26 (1952 or 1953) he comes home and finds that Doreen has packed up and left, with the children. Soon afterward his workplace burns down, so now he has no family, no job, and no prospects. His sister Joan spends a lot of time with him consoling him, and one day suggests they re-decorate the kitchen. They stay up all night painting, and realize it is Shrove Tuesday (assuming this happened in 1953 it would have been Feb 17th). They make pancakes and Sanders confesses to Joan that he practices witchcraft, telling her what I hope is a sanitized version of what happened with his grandmother. She disbelieves him, mockingly telling him to conjure up a demon.

Apparently Sanders kept his witchcraft tools just lying about (did he stop trying to hide things after Doreen left?), because he grabs his athame and starts conjuring up a demon, “someone they both knew” (where did he get this conjuration from?). This presumably works, because someone actually does come and knocks at the door – a family friend in need of a place to stay at three in the morning. Joan refuses to let him in the house.

Frightened, Joan tells him he has to stop playing with magic, but the embittered Sanders just goes off on a tear about all the ways life has let him down (in this modern age I wonder if he would have become one of those blackpilled incel Redditor types) and has no wealth, money, or prospects, and that he will start using magic to get it – wealth, luxury, leisure. Nevermind that he had just told Joan magic shouldn’t be sued for selfish ends! He sets up a magic Circle and gets ready to work.

“By the light of candles he described a magic circle with his sword, excluding Joan. When she made as if to speak he told her to keep quiet, or get out. The air became heavy with incense as he worked the spells and recited the words that would lead him from white witchcraft to black. ‘By all the powers I command the demons to bring me wealth, riches, power…’ Joan sobbed quietly, not understanding all that was going on but realizing that her beloved brother was bargaining for his soul with the devil and that, in the end, someone would have to pay.”

OK, so this is the part I have some major questions about, namely: where did he get this ritual from? At this point in his story he hadn’t had contact with any other witches or magicians, he hadn’t read anything on the subject anywhere, so…..was this ritual in his grandmother’s Book of Shadows and then copied by him into his own? Why did she have this? Where did she get it from? What spells was he working? Was this some fancy Ars Goetia-style conjuration kind of deal, or what? And which particular demons? All of them? To the best of my knowledge this sort of demonic material isn’t exactly, uh, common in traditional Wiccan material (unless those Third Degrees are keeping it all to themselves, the greedy buggers), and I can’t see how Sanders would have come across any of this kind of thing.

Obviously this is all complaining on my part because Sanders didn’t actually have any contact with witches of any sort until he saw the Crowthers on TV in 1961, but it’s the lack of internal consistency in the narrative of his life that he is presenting here that bothers me. I don’t think of myself as being extremely intelligent, I’m a college drop-out for God’s sake, but even I, being a simple Canadian of humble means, am able to see massive plot-holes in the story presented here, and it’s bugging the shit out of me.

Join us next time for Chapter 5 - Bewitched, in which things Get Weird again.

[tyetknot]

King of the Witches - A Review | Chapter 2 - A Magic Childhood

King of the Witches Chapter Two – A Magic Childhood

Introduction | 1 - The Young Initiate | 2 - A Magic Childhood | 3 - The Haunted Hill | 4 - Call Down The Spirits | 5 - Bewitched

Thank you for joining me once again as I examine June Johns’ King of the Witches, a biography of Alex Sanders, founder of Alexandrian Wicca. In previous installments we looked at the Introduction and chapter 1 – The Young Initiate which detailed Sanders’ physically impossible initiation into witchcraft at the hands of his maternal grandmother who, as I explained in the last entry of this series, died 19 years before he was born. If you think that sounds ridiculous and absurd, well, strap in because there’s lots more coming.

Chapter 2 starts out telling us that Sanders was a quick study in the secrets of witchcraft (allegedly he learned to read at the age of 3) which he was taught by his grandmother after school. He would go to see her, ostensibly for lessons in Welsh, but after half an hour or so the language lessons were put aside and mystical secrets became the subject instead. The book tells us about him learning about the ritual tools:

“The runic symbols dating back thousands of years when prophets cast sticks into the air and, from the pattern they made in landing, foretold the future; the inscriptions on the witches’ dagger – the kneeling man, the kneeling woman, the bare breasts touching, the arrow speeding through the wheel of life down into the pointed blade, ready to strike at its owner’s bidding; the miniature whip, a harmless substitute for the earlier weapon with which members were scourged, sometimes to the point of death; and the glistening crystal, which fascinated him most of all.”

Now, we know of course that evidence for the use of runes in divination is skimpy at best, but the part that interests me here is the fact that the symbols described here for the athame do not quite match the ones commonly used for this tool from the Greater Key of Solomon, because the symbol representing the Perfect Couple is absent from that symbol set – its earliest source that I can find in print is from Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft which came out in 1970, after which we see it suggested in a modern and Wicca-specific variety of these symbols composed by Doreen Valiente, which is described in the Farrar’s A Witches’ Bible / The Witches’ Way (published 1984). It may be that King of the Witches is the first printed reference to this variety of the athame symbols. If anyone has earlier sources for this, please let me know!

The symbols for the athame from Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft. The symbol for the Perfect Couple is third from the right.

The black-handled knife from the Mathers Key of Solomon. The relevant symbol is the first one on the second row of the handle, and is very plainly the ancestor of that shown by Huson, but the Farrars say that Gardner’s explanation of these is a serpent representing life and a sickle representing death.

The bit about people being scourged to the point of death is obviously hyperbole.

We are also told of Sanders that “He learnt by heart the meaningless chants in a long-dead language” and practiced scrying into a bowl of water with a drop of ink in it. He foresees the birth of his sister Patricia, although this can’t have been too much of a shocker as she was apparently born three months later.

There are stories of visions he has of things that will happen to his schoolmates and consequences for childish mischief – apparently no scrying required! In addition to learning fortune-telling his grandmother also teaches him some rudimental theology:

“His grandmother had explained that there was only one God but that he was known by many names. It was easy, too, to accept that the Virgin Mary was the moon goddess in disguise.” I wonder if the Virgin Mary is as keen on castration as the Moon Goddess mentioned at the end of the previous chapter.

Grandmother Bibby regales the young Sanders with stories of Robin Hood, who was actually a witch who “used his powers to direct money where it was most needed, and to escape his pursuers.” This is rather obviously lifted from Margaret Murray, as is the book’s mention of Joan of Arc, “who was really the Witch Queen of France and unashamedly declared it by her dress in an age when witches were the only females who would wear men’s clothing.” Nonsense, of course. Margaret Murray cast a long and dark shadow.

Fortunately if someone was captured and sentenced to death, there would always be other witches hidden in the crowds at an execution who had smuggled drugs into the prison (obviously lifted from Gardner, this) and if not then they would hypnotize the victim with their magic powers.

Sanders learns herbalism from his grandmother’s teachings and also learns what each plant looks like from pressed examples his grandmother had kept in a book from when she was a girl – we are expressly told that there was barely even any grass where Sanders grew up. We also learn that his grandmother had been a member of a coven of four witches who at night went to an unnamed island in an unnamed mountain lake (belonging to witches since the Middle Ages) do perform rituals.

Sanders performs his first full moon ritual at the age of nine (so 1935 or so) where he also receives and consecrates his athame in a ritual nearly identical to Gardner’s method. Afterward he performs some manner of “calling down the moon”.

Keeping this double life secret poses some difficulties and he has some trouble after boasting to his friends that his grandmother owned swords and that he knows magic. He also starts assisting his grandmother with the rituals she performs to help sick neighbours who asked for help, and copying his own Book of Shadows using hers as a master. This was allegedly copied into an exercise-book and in the impossible event of Sanders’ story being true, I wonder what his explanation for what happened to it was. Possibly he re-copied it in a more adult hand at a later age? Doing this apparently allows him to advance his powers (because of more training? Because he has the athame?) and his grandmother lets him start using the magic crystal. His first attempt at crystal-gazing grants him a horrible vision of things to come, which we know is the aftermath of German bombings during the Second World War.

We learn that his grandmother gave him the witch-name Verbius and that hers was Medea. Now, this may be a bit of actual truth in Sanders’ account, for diFisoa in Coin For The Ferryman (2010) notes “Medea later meets Alex Sanders and makes a decision to initiate him on March 9, 1962.". Medea’s identity is still uncertain, but the prevailing theory is that this was Pat Kopanski. Sanders is following Gardner’s example here, in that Gardner used the conveniently dead Dorothy Clutterbuck as a cover for his working-partner Dafo. In the book Sanders asks his grandmother what would have happened had he never encountered her in a magic circle and she is unsure – she also says her own mother never knew she was a witch and neither did her own children.

He conjures up spirit children to play with (?) and is warned that using magic for selfish means will end in the magician’s destruction. His grandmother uses her powers to help her neighbours without their knowing, although this directly contradicts an earlier page where she uses her powers at their request.

The chapter, like the last one, closes with more grim portents of sadness to come.