Is it credible?

It seems so.

It is also difficult to believe.

The details are rich. The scenario is dark–about as black as it gets.

We speak here of a man named William (Bill) Schnoebelen, now a preacher in Dubuque, Iowa, exposing darkest “secrets”–personal and otherwise.

Start with the jarring fact that Schnoebelen (who did not respond to multiple attempts for an interview) once was enrolled in a minor seminary (it isn’t anymore) at Loras College in Iowa with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest.

That’s when Schnoebelen asserts that “I had a priest in my theology class who had a doctorate in theology and was teaching a course in Christology.

“He took me aside and he said, ‘If you want to be a priest in the Catholic Church, ‘it’s taught you know, sacerdotus est latus Christus,’ the priest is another Christ. He asked if I wanted to be like Christ and I said, ‘Of course.’ He said, ‘Well, if you want to be like Christ, you need to do what Christ did, and what He did was go to the East and studied with the gurus of India, and He went and studied with the lamas in Tibet, He went to Egypt and studied with the magicians there. That’s why He was able to do what He was able to do, to raise the dead and walk on water and do all these miracles.’

And adds Schnoebelen ,”Whatever a priest said in those days, you did. He was like God.”

Imagine!

Did a priest really say something like that?

It was back in the 1960s; who knows?

“So [the professor] said what you need to do is start studying the occult. This is a priest telling me this!

Schnoebelen went to a bookstore to the occult section and found a book called The Diary of A Witch, by Sybil Leek, who argued in the book that witches were not evil, that it was an ancient mystery religion. “She claimed Jesus was a witch and the twelve Apostles were His coven, along with their wives.”

The Lord rebuke you, Satan!

Anyway, Schnoebelen “bought into it.” He learned that there was a coven in Rockford, Illinois, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Dubuque, and he headed there and ended up initiated as a witch! This is according to an account he shared with a podcast called “Almost False.”

He then hooked up with a coven in Boston where he was made a witch “high priest” and soon started a coven in Dubuque and then Milwaukee.

Schnoebelen didn’t think there was a devil. He thought they were worshiping a god and goddess (though one had horns!). Classes were held in the basement of an occult bookstore, and it was packed with “quasi-hippies.”

In his tumble down this rabbit–or hell– hole, Schnoebelen  recounts that he soon also met a High Druid who lived atop a mountain on an organic farm and trained under him. Quite a spiral! There wasn’t anything exotic, when it came to mysticism, that didn’t grab the young man’s naive attention.

It was the bookstore owner who urged  young and naive Schnoebelen to read The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey, who argued that magic was really about Satan but Satan was an “archetype.” It was more like an energy, or “egregore” (a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals).

The trap was set. And Schnoebelen stepped right into its maw. “The devil was gradually pulling me in,” is the way he puts it.

So now Schnoebelen writes the Church of Satan in San Francisco and becomes a member of that. 

A Satanist—technically, a warlock or satanist in the second degree.

Most interestingly, that druid, who lived in Arkansas, told the young, yearning, now former seminarian that “if you really want to understand Luciferian energy, you need to join the Freemasonic Order. He himself was a thirty-third-degree Mason.”

He also advised Schnoebelen that if he ever felt in spiritual turmoil, he should also join the Mormons, which he claimed “was a Church started by witches for witches.” They could hide behind the image of clean-cut families with white picket fences.

At any rate, Schnoebelen joined the Masons at the same time that he was a satanist and a witch! He was to remain a Mason for nine years.

That’s packing it pretty tight. He was obviously the kind who, when searching, goes for the mother lode. He was communicating with a deeply satanic cult in Chicago called the Brotherhood. Schnoebelen covered all the bases.

“I sold my soul to the devil,” he admits flatly. “That’s how deep I got into this stuff.”

As far as Freemasonry, which he joined in 1975, it was the Scottish Rite.

“At what point does it get creepy?” he said. “There are tons of Christians who are Masons, literally thousands of them. When you start out as a Mason, they take you to this room, you take off all your clothes except for your undies, and they put you in like these pajamas. Typically one knee is bare and one breast is bare, your left breast. You’re blindfolded, and there’s like a cable around your neck, a velvet blue rope, and you’re tied up and led to the door of the lodge. There’s a guy leading you and he knocks on a door, and the guy on the other side says, ‘Who comes here?’ and your guide, who’s a lodge officer, says, Mr. Bill Schnoebelen, who has been long in darkness and now seeks to be brought to light, to receive the rights and benefits of the worship of the lodge, erected to God,’ as all members have done before.”

He says a lot of the Masons were Protestant ministers–that forty percent of Southern Baptist preachers belonged.

There’s an oath with a hand on a large King James Bible, and are sworn to secrecy, which of course he has broken.

From there the various initiations “get more creepy.” [scroll for more:]

We don’t have time for all the details. “Masonry is a religion, and it’s an anti-christ religion. Almost every major occult figure was a Mason.”

Schnoebelen says that includes all satanists.

“Basically Masonry is an anti-christ thing. Masonry is a religion.”

First is the Blue Lodge, which has three degrees. Everyone has to go through this.

Then there’s a choice between the Scottish Rite and the York Rite. The top of the York Rite is the Knights Templar. The Scottish Rite has 29 degrees for most. With the three previous degrees, that equals thirty-two degrees (“Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret”) and for dignitaries, a 33rd degree can be offered. He says at the 19th degree they actually try to call up the devil. The York Rite was the so-called “Christian path,” and he was advised to go this way because–believe it or not–he was still in the seminary.

Beyond that, are secret degrees that even most Freemasons don’t know about and in Europe that goes to 360 degrees. Schnoebelen got up to the 97th level (sexual alchemy).

What was the “royal secret”? Schnoebelen was to learn it was that you can live forever–or so they believed–by vampirizing children. “Only maybe one in a thousand Masons knows about this,” he claims. “The vast majority of Masons just think it’s a good ole boys’ club that teaches morality.”

But every time a Mason kneels, he believes, Satan draws energy.

As for satanism, he says the center for that is Chicago. They work with high-level Masons.

Schnoebelen was taken to a park in Glenn Ellyn, Illinois, for his satanic induction. It was broad daylight, but he was told not to worry about it, that even police there were satanists. In the park were “like Egyptian statues” and literally an altar.

We found this photo of the park.

There Schnoebelen swore an oath to Satan, that for seven years the devil would give him anything Schnoebelen wanted and then take him to hell–which was not a bad deal, the naive Schnoebelen believed, because hell was just a place of endless orgies, drugs, and other decadent pleasures.

He signed his name in blood in a black book.

He was a security guard in a warehouse at the time (obviously now out of the seminary).

Interestingly, when he wrote a check out for a subscription to a satanic journal–the canceled check came back with a female handwriting on it: someone at the bank had written, “I will be praying for you in Jesus’ Name.”

Although he scoffed at that, within twenty-four hours he says he lost his occult powers along with his job, and got sick. He went to a personal altar he had to Lucifer and prayed to the devil.

But Jesus answered.

The next day he got a call from two girls who wanted to meet him. They had a gift for him–Christian comic books about the dangers of the occult. The next day there was a knock on the door and there were Mormon missionaries.

This was 1980. He ended up join the Mormon Church because he though the two visitors were a sign from Lucifer.

The Druid had told him that Mormons were “white witches,” and so he while he and his wife got satanism out of their lives, they felt comfortable going to the Mormon Temple. “We did all the Mormon rituals, which actually are Masonic,” he asserts. “We got baptized and then after a year you’re made an elder. That’s what I was, and then later I was made an elders quorum president. That’s like an administrative role under a bishop (who heads what is like a local ward).

There he was going through rituals again, now in Salt Lake City.

“Most people don’t know that Joseph Smith, who was founder of the Mormon Church in 1844, was made a Master Mason in Illinois. He stole a lot of Mason rituals and created this ceremony. The whole thing was bizarre.”

He further asserts that he’d had the vision of a naked young woman on an altar with men around her chanting “Hail Lucifer” and it was the Celestial Room of the Mormon Temple.

It’s his claim, not ours.

But he says when to broached this bizarre vision with an elder with the ironic name James Faust, he was told, on “solemn testimony,” that what he’d “seen” was true.

Are there levels of Mormonism that, like levels of Masonry, are not known to the average member?

For your sage discernment.

“If you go to Temple Square,” he says, “you’ll see Masonic handshakes, you’ll see the All-Seeing Eye, you’ll see the sun, the moon, the stars. There are no Crosses on the Mormon Temple, nothing Christian on the outside.”

There’s a veil like Solomon’s and a secret invocation that’s almost word for word out of the satanic grimoire–an incantation.

“Mormonism is darker than Masonry, in my opinion,” he says. “the men at the top of the Mormon Church are devil worshippers, amd that power percolates into you and your family.”

At least he was not actively worshiping the devil and had eschewed drugs and other bad habits. As he rose in the Mormon ranks, in the early 1980s, he oversaw local missionaries, who he admits did some good things, as far as helping people.

Eventually, the make a long story short, he was brought back to Christianity by the Assemblies of God. He renounced all his occult oaths (and unfortunately also his Catholicism).

Quite a whirlwind!

Quite a circuitous course.

Stay tuned…