Researching Alex Sanders

Sanders was born in and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina and attended AC Moore Elementary School, Hand Middle School, and Dreher High School. He received degrees from the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia. He later taught in the Political Science Department at Harvard University.

As one of five founders, Sanders was the President of the Charleston School of Law from its founding in 2002 until 2013.

Judge Sanders currently teaches courses in the Political Science Department at the College of Charleston.

Raised in a working-class family, Alex, as a young man, began working as a medium in the local Spiritualist Churches before going on to study and practise ceremonial magic. In 1963, he was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca before founding his own coven, through which he merged many aspects of ceremonial magic into Wicca. He claimed to have been initiated by his Welsh-speaking grandmother, Mary Bibby (née Roberts), as a child, though recent research has disproven this, with Bibby dying in 1907, some 19 years before Sanders' birth.

Throughout the 1960s, he would court publicity in the press, appearing in a number of documentaries, marrying the 20 years younger Maxine Sanders, and was elected as "King of the [Alexandrian] Witches" in 1965 as he "[was] directly descended from witches, and equipped with knowledge that outstrips [his witches]...[we formally acknowledge you] as the foremost authority on witchcraft," something that led to other prominent Gardnerian Witches, such as Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, attacking him in the press. In the late 1970s and 1980s and prior to his death, he went on to found and work with a ceremonial magical group known as the Ordine Della Luna.

Sanders died on 30 April 1988 at St. Mary's Hospital at Hastings of cancer of the bronchus with bone metastasis.