Aleister Crowley, Jimmy Page and Britain's Occult Stars: Hollywood's Devil Stars (Part 2)

In Part 1, we followed Anton LaVey and the Hollywood stars who came to his Black House in San Francisco. But the American story has a British father. Long before LaVey shaved his head, an Englishman had already taught the world's newspapers to scream about black magic, and his shadow fell across British music, cinema and television for the rest of the century.

Part 2 crosses the Atlantic. Here the line between Satanism and other occult traditions is even blurrier, because most of the famous names were not satanists at all. They were Thelemites, Wiccans, collectors, artists or simply actors who played the devil too well. The tabloids rarely cared about the difference. As before, every name is sorted into documented involvement, adjacent or rumored, or pure myth.

Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man in the World

Category: documented occultist (Thelema, not Satanism)

Every story in this part leads back to one man. Aleister Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875 in Leamington Spa, the son of a wealthy brewing family. His parents belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a Christian sect so severe that it banned most entertainment and read the Bible as literal truth. The boy rebelled so violently that his own mother called him "the Beast," a reference to the Book of Revelation. Crowley took the name as a badge of honor and later signed himself "The Great Beast 666."

His father died when he was eleven, leaving him a fortune that allowed him to live as a gentleman of leisure for years. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he wrote poetry, played chess at a high level and discovered the occult. He was also one of the most daring mountaineers of his generation. In 1902 he took part in the first serious attempt on K2, and in 1905 he led an expedition to Kangchenjunga that ended in disaster when several members died in an avalanche. Critics accused him of refusing to help, and the episode added to his reputation for coldness.

The Golden Dawn and the Feud with Yeats

In 1898, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult society of Victorian Britain. Its members included the poet W. B. Yeats, the writer Arthur Machen and the actress Florence Farr. The Golden Dawn taught ceremonial magic, astrology, tarot and Kabbalah, and it shaped almost every Western occult movement that followed.

Crowley rose quickly but made enemies just as fast. Yeats and other London members considered him arrogant and morally suspect. In 1900, the order split, and Crowley sided with its leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, in a farcical confrontation at the order's temple in London, often called the Battle of Blythe Road, in which Crowley reportedly appeared in Highland dress and a black mask. The Golden Dawn never recovered, and Crowley left to build his own path.

The Birth of Thelema

In 1904, on his honeymoon in Cairo with his first wife, Rose Kelly, Crowley claimed that a spirit named Aiwass dictated to him The Book of the Law over three days. It became the founding text of Thelema, from the Greek word for "will." Its central line, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," would later be quoted by rock stars, filmmakers and graffiti artists. It did not mean "do whatever you like," as critics claimed, but rather "discover your true purpose and follow it." The nuance was lost on most of the world.

Crowley also bought Boleskine House, a remote manor on the shore of Loch Ness, where he planned a months-long ritual known as the Abramelin operation. According to legend, he abandoned it halfway and left the summoned spirits unbanished, which is why so many later owners believed the house was cursed. The legend has no evidence behind it, but it gave Boleskine a dark reputation that would attract a rock star seventy years later.

The Abbey of Thelema and the Scandal

In 1920, Crowley founded the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, a whitewashed farmhouse where he and his followers practiced sex magic, took drugs and painted the walls with erotic and demonic murals. It was meant as a school for a new age. When a young Oxford graduate named Raoul Loveday died there in 1923, probably from an infection after drinking contaminated water, his widow, Betty May, sold her story to the British press.

The press exploded. The Sunday Express and especially the weekly John Bull ran stories of orgies, animal sacrifice and black magic, and John Bull branded Crowley "the wickedest man in the world." Mussolini's government expelled him from Italy the same year. The phrase stuck to him for the rest of his life and has followed him ever since.

Decline and Death

Crowley's fortune was gone by the 1920s, and his last decades were spent in poverty, heroin addiction and legal battles. In 1934, he sued the artist Nina Hamnett for libel after she described him as a black magician in her memoir, and he lost spectacularly when the trial became a public airing of his own writings. In his final years, he worked with the artist Frieda Harris on the Thoth Tarot, one of the most widely used tarot decks today.

He died in a boarding house in Hastings in 1947. At his cremation in Brighton, a friend read his poem "Hymn to Pan," and local councilors protested that a black mass had been held in their town. Even in death, he was a scandal.

Crowley at the Movies

Crowley never became a star himself, but cinema could not leave him alone. Somerset Maugham, who had met him in Paris, based the villain of his novel The Magician (1908) on him, and Rex Ingram filmed it in 1926 with Paul Wegener in the lead. The sinister Dr. Karswell in Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957) and the satanic leader Mocata in Hammer's The Devil Rides Out (1968) both owe him a debt. In Chemical Wedding (2008), co-written by Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, Simon Callow plays a professor possessed by Crowley's spirit.

Crowley and Rock and Roll

Music adopted him even more eagerly. He appears on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), in the back row. Ozzy Osbourne named a song after him, "Mr. Crowley," on his 1980 debut solo album, and David Bowie mentioned him in "Quicksand" (1971). For the rock generation, Crowley became the patron saint of rebellion, a figure who represented everything their parents feared.

Was he a Satanist? No. Crowley used satanic imagery to shock, and he enjoyed the scandal, but Thelema is its own religion with its own gods and texts. That distinction mattered little to the public. In 2002, he was even voted into the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons. With more than 90,000 searches a month in the US alone, he remains the most famous occultist in the English-speaking world, and the man every British star in this article either admired, feared or played.

Jimmy Page, Boleskine House and the Led Zeppelin Curse

Category: documented interest (Crowley collector, not a Satanist)

If one rock star became Crowley's heir in the public imagination, it was Jimmy Page. Before Led Zeppelin, Page was one of the busiest session guitarists in London, playing on hundreds of records in the early 1960s, before joining the Yardbirds. He has said that he first read Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice as a boy of eleven, and that the book stayed with him for life.

By the time Led Zeppelin became the biggest band in the world in the early 1970s, Page had the money to turn his interest into a serious collection. He acquired Crowley's manuscripts, first editions, paintings, robes and personal possessions, and he became one of the most important private collectors of Crowley material anywhere. Scholars of the occult have described his collection with respect.

Buying Boleskine House

In the early 1970s, Page bought Boleskine House itself. The manor sits on the southeastern shore of Loch Ness, near the village of Foyers, overlooking the water. Page rarely lived there, leaving it in the care of a friend, but owning it was a statement. He told interviewers that strange things had happened in the house long before Crowley, including a church that had burned with its congregation inside on the same site, a story that is part of local folklore.

He kept the house for about two decades before selling it in the early 1990s. For Zeppelin fans, Boleskine became a pilgrimage site, and for Page's critics, it was proof that the guitarist had gone too far.

The Equinox Bookshop

Page did not hide his interest. In the mid-1970s, he opened an occult bookshop and publishing house in Kensington called the Equinox, named after Crowley's journal. The shop sold rare books on magic and the occult and published facsimile editions of Crowley's work. It was a small, serious business rather than a gimmick, and it lasted only a few years, but it showed how committed Page was to the subject.

The Occult in the Grooves

The interest also found its way into the music. On early pressings of Led Zeppelin III (1970), the phrases "Do what thou wilt" and "So mote it be" were scratched into the run-out grooves of the vinyl. On the untitled fourth album of 1971, each band member chose a symbol, and Page's, often read as "Zoso," has never been explained by him. Fans have spent half a century trying to decode it, linking it to astrology, alchemy and old grimoires.

The inner sleeve of that album shows the Hermit, a figure from the tarot, holding a lantern on a mountain. In the band's concert film The Song Remains the Same (1976), Page's fantasy sequence shows him climbing a hillside at night near Boleskine to meet the Hermit, who turns out to be Page himself at different ages. It is one of the most explicitly occult sequences in any rock film.

The Feud with Kenneth Anger

Page's link to Kenneth Anger, discussed in Part 1, brought the two worlds together. In the early 1970s, Anger hired Page to compose the score for Lucifer Rising and was given space to work in the basement of Page's London house. Years passed, and only part of the music arrived. In 1976, Anger publicly attacked Page, accused him of being too absorbed in drugs to finish, and even claimed to have put a curse on him. Page's partial score was dropped, and Bobby Beausoleil's prison recording replaced it. Page's music was finally released decades later.

The Curse That Wasn't

Then came the tragedies. Robert Plant and his wife were badly injured in a car crash on the Greek island of Rhodes in 1975. In 1977, Plant's five-year-old son Karac died of a sudden illness while the band was on tour in America. In 1980, drummer John Bonham died after a day of heavy drinking, and the band split up. The press and fans spoke of a Zeppelin curse, a price paid for Page's dealings with dark powers, or for Boleskine itself.

The 1985 biography Hammer of the Gods by Stephen Davis spread the idea to a new generation, mixing real tragedy with rumors of a pact with the devil. Even "Stairway to Heaven" was dragged in when American preachers claimed it contained satanic messages when played backward, and the song was mentioned in a 1982 California legislative hearing on so-called backmasking.

The Verdict

In 2015, Boleskine House was gutted by fire, and the legend gained another chapter. The truth, however, is less dramatic. Page studied Crowley the way a scholar or collector would, he has described Crowley as a misunderstood genius rather than a devil-worshipper, and there is no evidence he took part in satanic worship. The tragedies were real, but so were the hard-living habits of 1970s rock. Still, more than any other musician, Page made the occult look like the natural companion of rock and roll.

The Rolling Stones, Anita Pallenberg and Their Satanic Majesties

Category: rumored and adjacent

No band flirted more openly with the devil than the Rolling Stones. From the start, their image had been built as the dark opposite of the Beatles: scruffier, sexier and more dangerous. In 1967, after a year of drug arrests and court cases, the band released Their Satanic Majesties Request. The album was mostly a psychedelic answer to Sgt. Pepper, and its title was a joke on the phrase printed in British passports, "Her Britannic Majesty requests." But the word "satanic" did its work, and a new image was born.

Sympathy for the Devil

A year later came "Sympathy for the Devil," the opening track of Beggars Banquet (1968), sung from Lucifer's point of view as he boasts of his role in history's atrocities. Jagger has said he was inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, in which the devil visits Soviet Moscow, a book Marianne Faithfull had given him.

Jean-Luc Godard filmed the band recording the song for his film One Plus One (1968), later released as Sympathy for the Devil. The footage shows the song transforming over days from a folk ballad into the samba-driven anthem everyone knows. In the band's television special The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, filmed in late 1968, Jagger performed it bare-chested, revealing a temporary tattoo of the devil. The song made the band's image permanent.

Kenneth Anger and the Stones

Behind the imagery stood a real occult connection. Kenneth Anger befriended Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in London, stayed in their circle and tried to cast Jagger as Lucifer. He saw Jagger and Richards as living embodiments of Lucifer and Beelzebub, a role they were happy to play on stage. Jagger composed the soundtrack for Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and Marianne Faithfull, then Jagger's partner, later played Lilith in Lucifer Rising.

Another member of the circle linked these worlds. The writer and director Donald Cammell, who co-directed Performance with Nicolas Roeg, played the Egyptian god Osiris in Lucifer Rising. The Stones' London of the late 1960s was a small world in which rock, film and the occult overlapped constantly.

Altamont: The Devil Comes to Collect

The flirtation ended in December 1969 at the Altamont Speedway in California, a free concert meant to be the West Coast's answer to Woodstock. The Hells Angels were hired as security, and the day descended into violence. During the Stones' set, a young concertgoer named Meredith Hunter, who had drawn a gun, was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels in front of the stage.

Myth claims the band was playing "Sympathy for the Devil" at the moment of the killing. In fact, it happened during a later song, but the legend was too powerful. The documentary Gimme Shelter (1970) by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin captured the chaos, including Jagger watching the footage in silence. To many, it seemed to confirm that the devil had come to collect. The band quietly backed away from satanic imagery for years afterward.

Anita Pallenberg: The Witch of the Stones

The member of the circle most often called a witch was Anita Pallenberg. Born in Rome in 1942 to a family of German and Italian background, she was multilingual, worldly and fearless. She became the partner of Brian Jones, the Stones' founder, then left him for Keith Richards, with whom she had three children. Friends and biographers describe her as the band's muse and its most dangerous presence.

Her interest in magic was widely discussed. Some in her circle said she studied the occult and practiced rituals, and the rumors grew more lurid over time. They reached their peak in 1979, when a teenage boy died from a gunshot wound at the house she shared with Richards in New York State. The death was ruled a suicide, but local gossip and tabloid stories spoke of witchcraft and black magic. There was no evidence of either.

Pallenberg on Screen

On screen, Pallenberg was unforgettable. She played the Great Tyrant, the black-clad ruler of the city of Sogo, in Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968), opposite Jane Fonda. Two years later, she was the sensual, ambiguous center of Performance (1970), the hallucinatory gangster film with Mick Jagger and James Fox, which Warner Bros. considered so shocking that it delayed its release for two years. Her presence in that film, mixing sex, drugs and identity games, sealed her reputation as the sorceress of swinging London.

There is no evidence that Pallenberg belonged to any satanic or witchcraft group. She died in 2017, by then admired as a style icon and a survivor. Her reputation as a witch came from her intensity, her circle and her refusal to play the passive rock wife. She belongs in this series as an example of how a strong, unconventional woman could be turned into a witch by gossip alone.

Graham Bond: The Bluesman Who Claimed Crowley as His Father

Category: documented occultist

Few names in British music are as important and as forgotten as Graham Bond. Born in 1937 in Romford, east of London, he was adopted as a baby from an orphanage, a fact that would later feed his fantasies about his true parentage. He began as a jazz saxophonist and was soon recognized as one of the most exciting young players in Britain, playing in the bands of Don Rendell and Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, the group that also launched members of the Rolling Stones.

The Graham Bond Organisation

In 1963, Bond formed the Graham Bond Organisation, one of the most influential bands of the British blues boom. Its lineup included bassist Jack Bruce, drummer Ginger Baker and saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, and for a time the future jazz guitar legend John McLaughlin. Bruce and Baker later left to form Cream with Eric Clapton, and many critics argue that Cream's sound was born in Bond's band.

Bond himself switched from saxophone to the Hammond organ, which he played through loud amplifiers, and he was among the first British musicians to use the Mellotron on stage and record. Keyboard players from Jon Lord of Deep Purple to Keith Emerson acknowledged his influence. Yet the band never had a hit, and Bond watched his former sidemen become stars while he struggled.

America and the Turn to Magick

In the late 1960s, Bond moved to the United States, recorded with American musicians and released albums including Love Is the Law (1969), whose title came straight from Crowley's The Book of the Law. By then he had become obsessed with the occult. He studied ceremonial magic, astrology and numerology and came to believe, or at least to claim, that he was Aleister Crowley's illegitimate son. There is no evidence for this, but given his unknown birth parents, the fantasy gave him an identity.

Holy Magick

Back in Britain, Bond formed a musical and magical partnership with his wife, singer Diane Stewart. Their albums Holy Magick (1970) and We Put Our Magick on You (1971) were built around ritual invocations, chants and occult themes, sometimes stretching across an entire side of vinyl. Bond performed in robes covered with occult symbols and presented himself as a working magician. He also played in Ginger Baker's Air Force and collaborated with the American folk singer Carolyn Hester on the album Magus.

Critics were baffled, audiences shrank and the record labels lost interest. Today, these albums are prized by collectors of occult rock, and they are among the most sincere attempts any British musician made to fuse ritual magic with popular music.

A Tragic End

Bond's life collapsed under drug addiction, debt and mental illness. His marriage ended, he suffered breakdowns and he spent time in hospital. On May 8, 1974, he died under a train at Finsbury Park station in London. He was 36.

Inevitably, rumors linked his death to his occult experiments, with some claiming he had been punished for meddling with forces he could not control, and others suggesting he had been the victim of a magical attack. The more likely explanation is a man in crisis who had been failed by the industry he helped to build. Bond remains a genuine example of a British star whose occult involvement was real and public, and his story deserves far wider attention than it gets.

Genesis P-Orridge and Britain's Satanic Panic

Category: documented occultist, falsely accused of Satanism

Genesis P-Orridge was one of the most radical artists Britain ever produced. Born Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, Genesis grew up in the north of England, dropped out of university in Hull and became part of the counterculture of the late 1960s. Genesis adopted a new name and identity, the first of many transformations in a life devoted to dissolving boundaries between art, music, religion and the self.

COUM Transmissions and the "Wreckers of Civilization"

In 1969, Genesis founded COUM Transmissions, a performance art collective that staged deliberately shocking actions involving nudity, bodily fluids and ritual. Its key member alongside Genesis was the artist Cosey Fanni Tutti. In October 1976, COUM's exhibition Prostitution at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts featured pornographic images and used tampons, and the press erupted. The Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn denounced the group as "wreckers of civilization," a phrase Genesis wore proudly for the rest of their life.

Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Music

The same year, Genesis, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson founded Throbbing Gristle. The band invented industrial music, a harsh, electronic, confrontational sound built on noise, tape loops and disturbing themes such as serial killers and Nazi imagery. They released records through their own label, Industrial Records, which gave the genre its name. Throbbing Gristle broke up in 1981, but its influence on electronic music, from Nine Inch Nails to techno, is enormous.

Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth

After Throbbing Gristle, Genesis formed Psychic TV, a more melodic and psychedelic project that released a vast number of recordings. Alongside the band came Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, often shortened to TOPY, founded in 1981. TOPY was an occult network inspired by Crowley, the artist and magician Austin Osman Spare and the writer William Burroughs, with whom Genesis was close.

Members practiced sigil magic, in which a desire is turned into a symbol and charged through ritual, often involving sexual fluids. TOPY rejected the idea of gurus and presented magic as a technique for personal liberation and creativity. It was an art project, a fan club and a magical order at the same time, and it attracted thousands of young followers across Europe and America. It had nothing to do with Satan, but to outsiders, its imagery and secrecy looked sinister.

Britain's Satanic Panic

Then came Britain's Satanic Panic. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, British media, some evangelical activists and a number of social workers became convinced that satanic ritual abuse of children was widespread. In Rochdale and the Orkney Islands, children were taken from their families on the basis of such claims, which later collapsed. The panic was imported in part from the United States, where similar claims had led to the notorious McMartin preschool trial.

The 1992 Accusation

In February 1992, the Channel 4 documentary series Dispatches broadcast a program that aired footage it presented as evidence of satanic abuse. The footage was in fact from First Transmission, an experimental art video made by Psychic TV, featuring consenting adults. Police raided Genesis's home in Brighton while the family was abroad in Nepal, seizing photographs, videos and archives.

No charges were ever brought. In 1994, a government-commissioned report by the anthropologist Jean La Fontaine found no evidence of organized satanic ritual abuse in Britain, concluding that the claims were based on misunderstandings and false testimony. But the damage was done. Advised that they might face arrest if they returned, Genesis and family remained in the United States.

Exile and Pandrogeny

In America, Genesis began a new project with partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge called Pandrogeny, in which both underwent surgical procedures to resemble each other, aiming to merge into a single being beyond gender. After Lady Jaye's death in 2007, Genesis continued the project alone. Genesis died in New York in March 2020 after a long illness, and is now celebrated in museums and exhibitions as a pioneer of performance and gender art.

With more than 5,000 searches a month, Genesis P-Orridge remains one of the most searched names in this series. The story is a powerful warning about how easily occult art can be rebranded as crime, and how a moral panic can destroy a life without a single charge being filed.

Christopher Lee and Dennis Wheatley: Playing the Devil, Warning Against Him

Category: pure rumor

No actor is more closely associated with satanic and occult cinema than Christopher Lee. Born in London in 1922, he came from an aristocratic background, served in the Royal Air Force and in intelligence during the Second World War, and was a step-cousin of the James Bond author Ian Fleming. After the war, he spent years playing small parts until Hammer Films cast him as the Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and then as Count Dracula in Dracula (1958).

Dracula made him a star and typecast him for decades. He played the count again and again, sometimes reluctantly, and his height, voice and aristocratic bearing made him the ideal embodiment of evil. It was no wonder rumors grew that the man with the deepest voice in British horror had a private interest in the dark arts.

Satanic Roles

Lee's filmography reads like a catalogue of the occult. In Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), his count is summoned through black magic rituals in modern London. He played Lucifer himself opposite Sammy Davis Jr. in the American television film Poor Devil (1973). And in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), written by Anthony Shaffer, he played Lord Summerisle, the charming pagan ruler of a Scottish island who leads a human sacrifice. Lee considered it his finest role and championed the film for the rest of his life.

The Devil Rides Out

Lee's most important occult film, however, was The Devil Rides Out (1968), directed by Terence Fisher for Hammer and adapted by Richard Matheson from Dennis Wheatley's novel of 1934. For once, Lee played the hero, the Duc de Richleau, an expert in black magic who fights to save a young friend from a satanic cult led by Charles Gray's Mocata, a character with clear echoes of Crowley.

Lee had long wanted to bring Wheatley's novels to the screen and pushed Hammer to make the film. Its centerpiece, a long night in which the heroes are besieged inside a protective chalk circle by giant spiders and the Angel of Death, is one of the most memorable sequences in British horror. The film is still regarded as Hammer's finest supernatural work.

To the Devil a Daughter

Eight years later came To the Devil a Daughter (1976), directed by Peter Sykes and also based on a Wheatley novel. This time, Lee reversed roles and played Father Michael Rayner, a defrocked priest leading a satanic order that plans to use a young nun, played by a teenage Nastassja Kinski, as a vessel for the demon Astaroth. Richard Widmark co-starred as an occult novelist. It was Hammer's last horror film of the era, and Wheatley reportedly disliked how far it strayed from his book.

Dennis Wheatley: The Man Who Sold Satan to Britain

Dennis Wheatley, born in 1897 into a London wine-merchant family, was one of Britain's best-selling novelists from the 1930s to the 1970s. He wrote thrillers, historical adventures and spy stories, but his black magic novels, including The Devil Rides Out, To the Devil a Daughter, The Haunting of Toby Jugg and The Satanist, made Satanism a mass-market subject in Britain long before LaVey.

Wheatley researched carefully. He met Aleister Crowley through the journalist and politician Tom Driberg and consulted occultists and scholars. Yet his books often carried a preface warning readers not to dabble in the occult, which he described as genuinely dangerous and capable of leading to madness and ruin. He was a fascinated observer and a conservative moralist, not a practitioner, and his novels always ended with the forces of light triumphant.

Lee's Library and His Warnings

Lee was similar. He owned a huge library on the occult, read widely in magic, witchcraft and demonology, and spoke about the subject with real authority. Directors who worked with him on occult films often found that he knew more than their researchers. But he consistently warned others against practicing it. In interviews, he said he had met people who claimed occult powers, that he had seen people damaged by involvement, and that he would never advise anyone to try.

Late in life, Lee became an unexpected heavy metal star, releasing symphonic metal albums about Charlemagne, from whom he claimed descent, which only added to his dark legend. He died in 2015, still one of the most beloved actors in fantasy and horror. There is no evidence that Lee belonged to any occult group. He was a scholar of evil who preferred to keep it on screen.

Alex and Maxine Sanders: The King and Queen of the Witches

Category: documented occultists (Wicca, often mislabeled as Satanism)

If Crowley taught the British press to fear magic, Alex and Maxine Sanders taught it to sell. To understand them, we need to start with Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant who, after Britain repealed its Witchcraft Act in 1951, went public with the claim that he had been initiated into a surviving coven of witches. Gardner's teachings became Gardnerian Wicca, a modern religion centered on a goddess and a horned god of nature, seasonal festivals and ritual magic. Wicca had no connection to Satan, but the public could not tell the difference.

The Making of a King

Alex Sanders was born in Manchester in 1926 and claimed that his grandmother, a hereditary witch, had initiated him as a child after he walked in on her performing a ritual. Historians doubt the story, and his rivals accused him of copying Gardner's rituals. Sanders was undeterred. In the early 1960s, he built his own coven and declared himself "King of the Witches," a title no one had granted him but which the press happily repeated.

In 1965, he married Maxine Morris, a young woman from a Catholic background more than twenty years his junior. Together they moved their coven to a flat in Notting Hill in London and created what became known as Alexandrian Wicca, which blended Gardner's rituals with ceremonial magic from the Golden Dawn tradition. It became one of the main branches of modern witchcraft and spread across the world.

Tabloid Witchcraft

The couple understood the media perfectly. They allowed photographers into their rituals, which were often performed nude, or "skyclad," as Wiccans say. Maxine, young and striking, became the face of British witchcraft, and the pictures filled the Sunday papers for years, usually under headlines about black magic and devil worship. The couple appeared on television and gave countless interviews, and their flat became a destination for curious journalists.

Their publicity also produced serious writing. The journalist Stewart Farrar came to interview them, was initiated into their coven and wrote What Witches Do (1971), one of the most influential books on modern witchcraft. He later became a leading Wiccan author himself.

The Witches on Film

The Sanders also went to the movies. Their rituals were the subject of the documentary Legend of the Witches (1970), directed by Malcolm Leigh, a striking black-and-white film that mixes real coven ceremonies with reconstructions of witchcraft history. Long hard to find, it is now considered a cult classic of British folk horror. They were also associated with Secret Rites (1971), another documentary-style film about their coven.

Witchcraft and Folk Horror

The Sanders were famous at exactly the moment British cinema discovered folk horror. Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) all drew on the public fascination with pagan rites and rural cults that the couple's publicity helped to create. Their real rituals and these fictional ones fed on each other, and audiences often struggled to separate the two.

After the Fame

Alex and Maxine separated in the early 1970s. Alex moved to the south coast and continued teaching until his death in 1988. Maxine continued to lead a coven, teach and write, and she published a memoir, Firechild. She has spent decades trying to correct the satanic label and explain what Wicca actually is. Their story shows how British folk horror and real witchcraft fed on each other in the age of The Wicker Man, and how the line between religion and publicity could be crossed in both directions.

Valerie Georgeson: An Actress Lost to a Sect

Category: documented sect involvement (not Satanism)

Not every story in this series involves glamour or scandal. Some involve loss. Valerie Georgeson grew up in Durham and studied drama, theater arts and English literature at the University of Birmingham. She became an actress, working in repertory theater, radio and television, the classic training ground of British performers in the 1960s and 1970s.

She then turned to writing, first for radio and television and then as a novelist. She was one of the first writers on EastEnders, the BBC soap that became one of the most watched programs in British television history. By any measure, she had built a successful career on both sides of the camera.

A Vocation

According to her own account, the turning point came shortly after she married in 1969, when she felt a calling: that one day she would write a book for God. That sense of spiritual purpose led her, years later, to seek a teacher, and as so often happens in such stories, the seeker found the wrong one.

God, the Devil and Me

In her memoir God, the Devil and Me (2022), Georgeson describes how, at the height of her career, she disappeared from public life after joining an Indian sect led by a female guru. In her telling, the guru learned of her vocation, came to see her as a potential whistleblower, and vowed to stop her from writing, attacking her with what Georgeson describes as magic and occult powers. Her career was sacrificed, and she and her husband were drawn deeper into the group.

Escape and Exorcism

Eventually, Georgeson converted to Catholicism and escaped to France with her husband. There, she says, she was helped by an exorcist, and her husband was ordained as a deacon in the Catholic Church. Slowly, she writes, everything they had done in the sect was undone. The couple settled permanently in France and became French citizens in 2019. More than thirty years after her disappearance, she finally wrote the book she believed she had been called to write.

Why Her Story Matters

This was not Satanism, and Georgeson's book is a personal and religious testimony rather than a documented investigation. Readers will judge her spiritual interpretation for themselves. But it adds something the celebrity stories lack: the inside view of how a successful performer can be drawn into a closed group and lose years of her life and career.

In a series full of publicity stunts, tabloid myths and showmen like LaVey and Sanders, her account is a reminder that cults are not always glamorous, that they rarely announce themselves as dangerous, and that the damage they do can be real. It also links neatly to Part 3, where our story moves to France.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Aleister Crowley a Satanist?

No. Crowley founded the religion of Thelema and used satanic imagery to provoke, but he did not worship Satan. The tabloids called him the wickedest man in the world, and the label stuck.

What is the difference between Thelema and Satanism?

Thelema is a religion founded by Aleister Crowley in 1904, built around The Book of the Law and the idea of discovering one's True Will. Modern Satanism, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, uses Satan as a symbol of individualism and indulgence. The two are often confused but have different texts, beliefs and organizations.

Did Jimmy Page own Aleister Crowley's house?

Yes. Page bought Boleskine House on the shore of Loch Ness in the early 1970s and owned it for about two decades. He is a collector of Crowley material, but there is no evidence he practiced Satanism.

What happened to Boleskine House?

After Jimmy Page sold it, Boleskine House passed through private owners and was badly damaged by fire in 2015. It has since been the subject of restoration efforts.

Was Christopher Lee involved in the occult?

Lee owned a large library on the occult and studied the subject, but he consistently warned others against practicing it. His roles in The Devil Rides Out, The Wicker Man and To the Devil a Daughter fueled the rumors.

Was Genesis P-Orridge accused of satanic abuse?

Yes, in a 1992 British television documentary that presented footage from an experimental art video as evidence. Police investigated, no charges were brought, and the footage was later shown to be staged art.

Were the Rolling Stones satanists?

No. Songs like "Sympathy for the Devil" and the album Their Satanic Majesties Request flirted with satanic imagery, and the band was close to occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, but none of the members belonged to a satanic group.

Was Anita Pallenberg a witch?

Rumors about Pallenberg's interest in magic followed her for decades, and some friends described her fascination with the occult. There is no evidence that she belonged to any satanic or witchcraft group.

Who was the King of the Witches?

Alex Sanders, a Manchester-born occultist who founded Alexandrian Wicca with his wife Maxine. The press often branded them satanists, though Wicca has no connection to Satan.

Coming next: Part 3 travels to France, from the black masses of Louis XIV's court to the Paris occult underground and the hoax that made Jean Cocteau a secret grand master.