Alex died on the morning of April 30 1988, the festival of Beltane. As Gemini his Sun sign rose on the Eastern horizon and as the Moon waxed to fullness in the last degrees of Libra and headed for Scorpio the sign of his Ascendant, he passed out of his body and into a new phase of incarnation, another spiral of the Goddess' spiral dance.

Chris and I did not hear of Alex's death until later in the day because that morning we had gone to Wiltshire to greet a coven member's new baby. Before we left, I went into the temple to meditate and picked up a piece of rose quartz which I keep on the altar, a gift from Alex. To my surprise I found that there was a small round burn beneath the stone which went right through the four layers of altar cloth and into the wood of the altar beneath. I knew then that some strange focusing of the power had taken place, but I did not know why.

We saw the new baby and headed home to London. Anticipating the baby's birth, we had already celebrated Beltane a few days before, but since the Moon was almost full we intended have a circle to have another celebration. However, when we reached the motorway, on impulse we decided to go to Wayland's Smithy, a burial mound on the Ridgeway, a four thousand year old track that crosses part of Southern Britain.

Chris and I arrived at dusk. Surprisingly the site was not full of other Pagans; we were alone. We said the invocations and charges of the Full Moon and meditated on the forces of Beltane moving across the land. We thought of all the other Beltanes when we had come here and of how, two years before, we had found two crowns of leaves and flowers upon the mound, a sign that others had also come to the holy spot to celebrate the Sacred Marriage of Goddess and God.

We thought of that sacred marriage between the beautiful May Queen and the Greenwood King, but as we looked up to the Moon hanging golden above the hushed fields of Wiltshire, it was as though another force contacted us, not the Green Man aspect of the God, but the solar force, the God as Sun King, and I realized that all day I had been singing a Pagan song:

In singing the song unconsciously I had changed one word of the original; instead of 'solstice', I sang 'sabbat'.

As we stood up the burial mound looking Eastwards, the direction of birth, I finished the song and began to say a charge not usually spoken by a Priestess, but the words that the God speaks at Midsummer, the feast of Kingship.

At Wayland's Smithy as I spoke these words of kingship, we sensed that a power was moving across the land and we looked up at the twinkling stars and wondered. Then another song came into my mind and we went to the entrance of the barrow and sang the words that open the tomb:

In my mind, I raised an athame and it was as though the stones that blocked the entrance to the tomb rolled away and a vision came then of a procession of naked priestesses carrying a bier on which lay a body which I knew was of a king. Still we did not understand what we saw, for the body was covered in a black cloth, but inside the tomb it seemed that torches had appeared and far to the back a veiled figure stood waiting. We knew the Dark Mother had truly come.

We returned to London and found a message on our answerphone telling us that Alex had died.

In the three days of the Full Moon in Scorpio, Alex walked amongst us and his spirit said farewell to many. Some spoke of his death on the Sabbat as that of a Sacrificial King, but it is Lammas which is the celebration of that feast and Alex was too good a magician to get it wrong. Alex died when he wished, not on a death feast, but on the marriage feast of Goddess and God.

Saint Augustine wrote that it was not to his death that Christ went at his crucifixion, but to marriage with his destiny. This may seem a strange analogy for Alex's death, but Saint Augustine, that most anti-Pagan missionary, seems to have been fated to bless both the beginning and ending of Alex's life. As Alex explained in his last taped message to the world, he had been baptized at Saint Augustine's Church and would die at Saint Augustine's Priory. His life had come full circle.

So Beltane was a marriage feast and not a feast of death, and since all marriages must be celebrated by a dance, what better dance for a magician and a witch, or for any man, than the dance of the elements?

So for Alex there was a second marriage feast; not this time to the beautiful Star Goddess to whom he had always been true, but to the Dark Earth Mother, the keeper of the tomb. But as folk songs tell us, when the king or the gentle knight is prevailed upon to lie all night with the Hag, he awakes to find himself in bed not with an ugly crone, but with a beautiful princess. Thus the Goddess tries the faith of all who would win her.

After the sickle of the waning Moon which takes away all that is given, comes the dark of the Moon when all is shadow, the hidden marriage bed. But the tomb is a passage and not a grave and at the end of the dark earth barrow, we find ourselves walking once more beneath the waxing crescent Moon of Isis Urania the Star Goddess, in the Isles of the Blessed.

So we who loved him say:

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