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Home » Transcript of Dr. William (Bill) Schnoebelen on Almost False Podcast

Transcript of Dr. William (Bill) Schnoebelen on Almost False Podcast

Here is the full transcript of former 33rd-degree Freemason Dr. William (Bill) Schnoebelen’s interview on Almost False Podcast episode titled “Former 33rd Degree Mason Reveals the Darkest Secrets of Freemasonry”, Mar 25, 2025.

The interview starts here:

Introduction

INTERVIEWER: Hello and welcome back to the Almost False podcast where I interview regular people with incredible stories. Today’s guest is someone who has explored the darkest levels of spirituality, one of them being Freemasonry. He became a 33rd degree Mason, was part of high level secret societies, and he is not afraid to share what he’s not supposed to talk about. So I took this opportunity to ask him as much as I could in the limited time that we had. No matter how much you know or don’t know about Freemasonry, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll learn a lot from this interview as everything that is shared here is in some way related to it. Get ready to have your mind blown by Dr. William Schnoebelen as he shares a dark journey that him and his wife took and the unsettling things that they uncovered along the way.

The Path Into the Occult

DR. WILLIAM SCHNOEBELEN: When I got to college, and again, I wanted to be a priest, I went to Loras College. At the time it was a minor seminary. It isn’t anymore. I had a priest in my theology class who had a doctorate in theology and he was teaching a course in Christology because again, I was wanting to be a priest. And 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 altus Christus.” The priest is another Christ. So if you want to be like Christ. And he says to me, do you want to be like Christ? And I said, well, of course. Doesn’t every Christian want to be like Christ? He said, well, if you want to be like Christ, you need to do what Christ did. And again, that made sense.

And again, you know, nowadays we’ve kind of become suspicious about priests, but this is like 1968, and a priest was like God. I mean, whatever the priest said, that was it, you know. And he said, well, if you want to be like Christ, then you do what he did. And he went to the east and studied with the gurus in India. He went and studied with the lamas in Tibet. He went to Egypt and studied with the magicians there. That’s how he was able to raise the dead, to walk on water, do all these miracles. So he says, what you need to do is you need to start studying the occult. And this is a priest telling me this.

And so I thought, okay. Now, mind you, you know, this is obviously decades before there was an Internet. I mean, there was a little bookstore downtown. And I went there and I found a few scattering books on, like, the occult. And I found this book that was called “Diary of a Witch” by Sybil Leake. And she was one of the very first witches to, so to speak, come out of the broom closet. She was a British woman, and she was a medium.

And anyhow, I read the book, and she was asserting in the book that witches were not evil, that this was an ancient pagan mystery religion. Among other things, she claimed that Jesus was a witch and his 12 apostles were his coven, along with their wives, you know. So I kind of bought into that. And I wrote to this guy, Alex Sanders, who was the supposed king of the witches over in London. I sent him a letter. This is around 1968, 69. And his wife sent me back a thing, okay, here’s a coven in Rockford, Illinois, which is about 90 minutes from Dubuque.

I went there, and I got initiated as a witch. And then later on, I hooked up with an Alexandrian coven in Boston, and I was made a witch high priest. Started covens in, first of all in Dubuque, where I was, and then moved to Milwaukee because there was a fellow there who had an occult bookstore, you know, because Milwaukee is a huge city. And he said, I’ve got all these people that want to become witches. Can you come and teach them?

Understanding Witchcraft

INTERVIEWER: When we’re talking about, like, you being in a coven, you doing witchcraft, I just want to make sure that we don’t skip over that part. Like, what kind of witchcraft are we talking about?

DR. WILLIAM SCHNOEBELEN: It was, okay, witchcraft originally, you know, the kind of publicly available witchcraft was originally started by Gerald Gardner. And he came out when witchcraft became legal in England. It was a crime until 1951 when it was made legal. And he claimed—all this is disputed—but he claimed that he came in contact with an ancient coven of witches in the New Forest region of England. They initiated him and then made him high Priest, and he went off and initiated other people.

Then there’s this other bunch, this Alexander’s fellow. He also claims to have been initiated by an ancient line of witches by his grandmother. So those were the two main fountainheads of witchcraft in the 60s. Both were from England, but both had spread to America, and it was white witchcraft.

Both groups, their rituals were virtually identical. But the Alexandrian group that I was in was more into ceremonial magic, which is like kind of if, you know, like Protestantism, they have the distinction between high church and low church. Well, Alexandrian is more high church witchcraft.

But we didn’t believe in the devil. We didn’t think we were worshiping the devil. We thought we were worshiping a goddess, a moon goddess and a horn God.