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.”

Start with the jarring fact that Schnoebelen (who did not respond to multiple attempts to arrange a personal 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 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.’

“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, so 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 call The Diary of A Witch, by Sybil Leek, who asserted in the book that witches were not evil, that it was an ancient mystery religion. “She claimed Jesus was a witch and the twelves Apostles were His coven, along with their lives.”

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.” He started a coven in Dubuque and then Milwaukee. He 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.”

He also met a Druid who lived atop a mountain on an organic farm and trained under him. Quite a spiral!

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!

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, whose 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 Mason 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.”

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