#June Johns

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

June Johns - King of The Witches: The World of Alex Sanders - C. Davies - 1969

[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.

[dreamingdeadly]

four kids play a game...

[calware]

now she has all the time in the world to figure it out

[ithinkdogshouldvote]

Guardian swap au for 4/13 ^ ^

[candycoated-rage]

my friend took this screenshot of me showing off my book collection and the bitrate dropped real bad here and i cant stop laughing at it. what the fuck

[leosulfurous]

You guys know what time it is, battle it out

[hamsterdads]

recent hs stuff ^^

[thunderbottle]

late night at the june egbert birthday party <3

[xlandloud]

lil lineup or something… was mostly meant for me but i liked how they turned out

[virusmeds]

sorry for being inactive my dear followers, heres some homestuck characters spinning to make up to it!!

feel free to request some ships to do next with this in comments/ask thing!! :D

[radiopaques]

Design line up yayayay I'll rb with more notes because i'm scared to mess up the formatting

[ozmodai]

==>

indivs! feel free to use as a phone bg.

[calware-png]

zzZ

[offkilterkeys]

Guys make sure to keep it down, I told them they could sleep on my dash.

[buzzingroyalty]