Maxine Sanders

Maxine Sanders was born Maxine Morris in Comberbach, Cheshire, in 1946, and was still a teenager when she was initiated into witchcraft by Alex Sanders, who was more than twenty years her senior; the couple married in 1965 and, from a London flat that quickly became the busiest initiation center in British witchcraft, ran the fast-growing practice that would be named Alexandrian Wicca after Alex. Contemporary accounts, including June Johns's 1969 biography of Alex, describe Maxine as the striking, forceful presence beside her more theatrically self-promoting husband, and within the tradition she was and still is addressed as Witch Queen, a title recognizing her own standing rather than a courtesy extended only through marriage.

The pace of initiation at the Sanders household in the mid to late 1960s was, by the standards of the older Gardnerian covens, close to reckless, bringing hundreds of newcomers into the craft in a few years and multiplying the number of working Alexandrian covens across Britain far faster than any prior tradition had spread. Maxine bore much of the practical weight of running that expansion, training initiates and maintaining the coven's ritual life, work that continued even as her marriage to Alex grew more difficult through the 1970s; the couple eventually divorced, but Maxine remained active in the Craft rather than stepping back from it.

After Alex Sanders's death in 1988, Maxine Sanders continued as one of Alexandrian Wicca's most senior living figures, teaching, giving interviews and writing about the tradition's history and practice from a perspective few others could claim, having lived through its founding rather than joined it afterward. Her 2008 memoir, Firechild: The Life and Magic of Maxine Sanders, gave her own account of the tradition's early years, including a more measured, sometimes critical view of Alex's public mythmaking than the movement's own early publicity had offered, and it remains a primary source scholars of Wicca draw on for the period.

Into her own eighties, Maxine Sanders has remained an active presence in Alexandrian Witchcraft, continuing to teach, to be interviewed by researchers and journalists covering the tradition's history, and to contribute to new publications examining Alexandrian Wicca's origins and development. As the last of the tradition's two founders still living, she occupies a position within Alexandrian Witchcraft roughly parallel to what a founding elder occupies in any living religious movement: not a historical figure known only through others' accounts, but an active participant in how the tradition continues to understand its own history.