The Prodigal Witch XII: Doc Marquis

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Doc Marquis lecturing for The Prophecy Club, c. 1997

In the mid ’80s, an Illuminati defector and former devil worshiper known as Joseph “Doc” Marquis slipped into the niche vacated by John Todd, who was serving time for a rape conviction. Marquis started out as a virtual John Todd clone, but proved to be far more resilient than his predecessor. For the past two decades, Marquis has deftly surfed the waves of Christian conspiracy culture.

An unassuming, clean-cut guy with a slight speech impediment, Marquis speaks calmly and softly, eschewing the brimstone theatrics and stand-up schtick that many ex-Satanists use to spice up their acts.
But his claims are transparently absurd, tailored for the same crowd that insists John Todd was framed by Illuminati overlords. In fact, Marquis was a supporter of Todd’s work and discredited himself early on by parroting Todd’s nonsense. Then he made things even worse for himself by declaring that Mike Warnke, Rebecca Brown, Elaine Moses and Lauren Stratford had been Illuminati members, too. As we have seen, all these people crafted alternate histories for themselves in the ’70s and ’80s. (1)

There’s some question as to whether Marquis can really call himself a former Satanist, since he has stated the Illuminati believes in Lucifer, not Satan, and holds Satanists in disdain (if this makes any sense, let me know). His real cachet is as a former Illuminati member. (2)

Marquis’s first notable appearance was on the June 24, 1987 broadcast of Oprah. Though he began speaking publicly about his past sometime in the early ’80s, this was his first major gig. The show dealt with Wicca, and Marquis (as a “former Illuminati member”) was a naysayer, brought on to warn of the hazards of witchcraft alongside evangelist/exorcist Bob Larson. For the record, Oprah was open to everything Marquis had to say and at times chided other guests for questioning his more absurd statements about human sacrifice. After describing a previous guest who supposedly suffered Satanic ritual abuse, she said, “Just because… nobody found the bodies and nobody called in to a newspaper and said human sacrifices are going on, doesn’t mean that it does not exist.” (2)

If she had known more about his background, she might not have been so open. Prior to Oprah, Marquis was a supporter of The Family International and gave lectures at the church’s Friendswood Home in Houston. (3)
The Family was once known as The Children of God, and under the leadership of the crazed pedophile David “Moses” Berg, its members were urged to become prostitutes and molest children. As an adult, Berg’s son Ricky was still so severely traumatized by his molestation that he murdered one of the women who abused him, then killed himself.
The Family has tried very hard to shake its horrific past and move on, but COG’s international legacy of child abuse and cult manipulation won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

It was probably the Oprah appearance that gave Marquis just enough temporary street cred to be invited on Geraldo Rivera’s May 1989 show about the Matamoros killings, as a “former Satanic high priest”. Though the Matamoros drug murders involved a cultish cartel that practiced a bizarre form of ritual sacrifice (mostly on enemies, but sometimes on random strangers), they had nothing to do with Satanism and even less to do with the Illuminati. Marquis also boasts of appearing or acting as a consultant for Unsolved Mysteries, Hard Copy, and Talk of the Town, but I can’t confirm any of that. (1)

Around 1997 Marquis gave two epic lectures to the Prophecy Club, the same fundamentalist/conspiracy outfit that hosted Satanic Illuminati vampire Bill Schnoebelen.
He was introduced as a seventh-generation (reformed) witch raised in an Illuminati family. In one talk, titled “America’s Occult Holidays”, Marquis wasn’t content to slam Halloween. He also tried to convince his Christian audience to stop celebrating Christmas, Easter, and Valentine’s Day in traditional ways, because it’s all Pagan-Satanic worship. (4)

These days, Marquis lingers on the conspiranoid fringe where he belongs. His videos and books are available online, and he was a presenter at this year’s Conspiracy Con, but I doubt there will be any more mainstream TV appearances.

John Todd Redux

Marquis claims he was a member of the U.S. branch of the Illuminati from a young age, but he can’t seem to decide what that age was. On Oprah, he said he was 5 years old when someone sent a demon to control him. (2)  In his Prophecy Club talks a decade later, he was 3 years old when it all began. (4)  At any rate, his tender age handily absolves him of all personal responsibility for the atrocities he attributes to the group, placing him in the same redeemed-victim category as John Todd (who was an Illuminati member from birth).
The Illuminati Marquis describes is identical in most respects to John Todd’s, being comprised of powerful “witches” who worship Satan, practice human sacrifice, and control basically everything. The Rothschild family is at the head of the Illuminati, just as John Todd said. In fact, It was Mayer Rothschild who gave the Illuminati its seed money, back in 1776. He formed a governing “apostleship” made up of twelve financiers.
It is incredibly unlikely that Rothschild had anything to do with the founding of Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati in 1776. At that time he was a coin dealer living in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt, prominent in his field but virtually unknown outside of it. He would not enter the banking world in a big way until nearly a decade later. The Bavarian Illuminati was comprised mainly of academics – and in keeping with the spirit of the order and the prejudices of the times, there was not a single banker or Jew among its ranks.

Born in 1956, Joseph was apparently not raised by his birth parents. It was a “foster aunt” who dedicated him to the Illuminati when he was just 3 or 5 years old. Presumably, it was she who sent a demon to him. His parents were kept out of the loop, and raised Joseph as a devout Catholic in Massachusetts. On Oprah, he said he even taught Sunday School, which (as fellow guest Whitley Strieber pointed out) would be odd – Catholic churches don’t usually have Sunday school.

Marquis explained that his training began with earth religion (witchcraft). “Eventually, as I got to the higher levels, your philosophy is changed. You are now told what’s really going on.” (2)
He must have moved up to the higher levels of witchcraft very quickly, because in later accounts he says he was just 10 years old when he began attending an occult training academy known as the Outer Court, just like John Todd. There he learned the rudiments of human sacrifice, alchemy, and other dark arts.
Like everyone else in this series, Marquis views any form of occultism as devotion to Lucifer. Earth religion and Satanism and the Illuminati are all jumbled together into one huge, amorphous lump of evil. He claims that all Wiccans of “higher levels” knowingly worship the Devil, and you can’t be in the Illuminati without pledging allegiance to Lucifer.

Marquis stated that Illuminists and all witches, in addition to worshiping Lucifer, pay homage to the Assyrian goddess Semiramis and the “god” Nimrod. I’m sure real witches would heartily disagree, but that doesn’t stop David Icke and other professional conspiranoids from saying it continuously. Icke even insists the Statue of Liberty is an Illuminist representation of Semiramis (see page 8 of his Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster).
Nimrod is not exactly a god. He’s an unruly descendant of Biblical patriarchs (Abraham, Noah) who supposedly reigned over various Mesopotamian cities. He may have been revered as a king of sorts, but the evidence for a cult of Nimrod is thin. It is mostly conspiracists like Alexander Hislop and Icke who conflate Nimrod with other deities and insist he was a consort of Semiramis, something mentioned only briefly by Josephus. This strain of thought seems to have begun with Hislop’s 1853 tract The Two Babylons, or the Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife.
So this leaves only two possibilities: Either Marquis is lying about the Illuminati worshiping Nimrod and Semiramis, or the truth was found out by a cranky anti-Catholic dude who never left his native Scotland.
At any rate, Marquis doesn’t go into much detail about Semiramis and Nimrod worship, which is quite typical of ex-Satanists and former Illuminati members.

At age 17, Marquis surpassed even Todd by becoming a “Master Witch” (a title Todd never mentioned). He ultimately attained the rank of Third Degree Master Witch, whatever that means. His superiors put him in charge of all the witches in three communities: Methuen and Lawrence in Massachusetts and Salem in New Hampshire.
After his formal witchcraft training was over he was ordered by his Illuminati superiors to join the Army as a medic, earning the nickname “Doc.” This is a bit odd; Todd claimed Illuminati witches are exempt from military service. Marquis says he was part of the Illuminati plan to infiltrate every military base on the planet and recruit military brass (in the ’80s, Christian conspiranoids were irate about Satanists being in the armed forces, with full Constitutional protection for their religious practices).

Marquis couldn’t be bothered to come up with his own cast list for his Illuminati drama, so he just used Todd’s: Prominent Wiccans Gavin and Yvonne Frost, Laurie Cabot and Raymond Buckland, plus Jimmy Carter’s sister Ruth Carter Stapleton. Todd mistakenly claimed that Buckland had been an anthropology professor at Columbia, but Marquis moved him over to Harvard.
Later on, he added Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, and alien abductee Whitley Strieber to the Illuminati ranks. The Tate murders occurred, he said, because Sharon Tate expressed her intent to defect from the Illuminati. This is probably derived from a claim made by Wiccan Alex Sanders that he initiated Tate in the ’60s, which has never been proven and was most likely (IMO) a publicity gimmick.
Strieber earned Marquis’s wrath by disputing his weird misinformation on Oprah (Strieber, though best-known as an alien abductee, appeared on the show only to discuss his novel Catmagic, which borrowed some ideas from Wicca).

One key difference between Todd’s stories and Marquis’s is that the latter’s Illuminati Satanists congregate on a regular basis (Todd said they don’t meet up at all, ever). According to Marquis, the Illuminati branches, and all the groups they control, perform human ritual sacrifices eight times per year. Marquis witnessed at least 100 human sacrifices during his time in the Illuminati. He talked about this on Oprah, explaining that the bodies of victims were left on roadsides or in wooded areas so that they would appear to be ordinary homicide victims. (2)

But the primary activity of the Illuminati is, of course, establishing a New World Order. In a hilarious illustration, Marquis identifies the elements of this hideous master plan to enslave mankind. They include Dungeons & Dragons, rock music, and “Sabbaths” (I think he means sabbats). All of the other ex-witches in this series warned about the evils of D&D, and Bill Schnoebelen even declared the game contained “real” spells that he gave to Gary Gygax in the late ’70s (after the game was already created), but I believe Doc Marquis is the only former Satanist to actually elevate D&D to a central plank in the NWO agenda.

Conversion and Anti-occult Crusade

Like Mike Warnke, Marquis credits Christians in the military with saving his soul. After three years in the service, he realized his way of life was spiritually bankrupt, walked into a church, and was saved on April 15, 1970. So the Illuminati issued a half-million dollar contract on his life. Marquis claims that there have been eight attempts on his life. Never mind that he was making public appearances throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. The Illuminati can control the world, but it can’t figure out how to assassinate one unarmed dude at a podium. I guess this means the Nation of Islam is better-organized than the Illuminati, which also failed to kill John Todd (who died of natural causes in a mental institution) and Mike Warnke (who’s still alive).  (4)

To fight the creeping menace of occultism, Marquis established the now-defunct National Occult Liberation Outreach Center and later an anti-occult ministry called Christians Exposing the Occult (also defunct). Since the early ’90s he has published numerous books and tracts, notably several volumes of the “American Focus on Satanic Crime” series, written with Alan H. Peterson. He now heads Creation Message Ministries with Cory Black, gives interviews to internet radio shows (mainly conspiracy-themed ones), and appears at conspiracy conventions such as Conspiracy Con and Future Congress.

Just a few of the ridiculous statements made by Marquis:
– In 1990, there were up to 3 million witches in New England. (1)
– Freemasons are an integral part of the Illuminati, just as John Todd said, and are working to install a Masonic Antichrist.
– Kabbala is a “very Satanic counterfeit to the Torah and other Old Testament books of the Bible.”
– Every “occult” organization, from Theosophy to Wicca, takes its orders from the Illuminati. And every single one must commit ritual human sacrifices eight times per year (on Oprah, he said only four of eight). The number of victims would be staggering. Marquis claims law enforcement and judicial authorities allied with the Illuminati help cover up these crimes – but if his numbers are accurate, there simply wouldn’t be enough authorities to cover up so many murders. (4)
– Certain “Witch queens” as young as 13 are so powerful they are given control of entire states. An identical claim was made by John Todd, who said his sister was in charge of the state of Ohio at age 13. (1)
– They use astrology to figure out when Easter is going to be every year. (4)
– Satanists are active in the “white slavery” and drug trades. As with all his other claims, Marquis offers no examples and no evidence. (1)
– Aleister Crowley was a Freemason, more evidence that Masonry and Satanist are intertwined. Bill Schnoebelen said this in a Prophecy Club lecture, too. It’s not strictly true. Crowley was into esoteric Freemasonry and claimed many degrees, but is not considered a bonafide Mason. (4)
– On Halloween, Druids painted pentagrams-within-circles in human blood on the doors of people who refused to offer up human sacrifices. The victims were herded to Stonehenge and ordered to stick their heads into a cauldron of boiling water. Only those who dared to do it were spared sacrifice, but of course they were left horribly burned. This is the tradition of bobbing for apples began. I would love to see his sources for this, because the first known mention of apple-bobbing dates to the eighteenth century. There is no indication that Druids did any such thing.  (4)
– The First Amendment is too lenient; neo-Pagan groups should not have tax-exempt status, and their members should not have the same Constitutional protection as Christians. (4)

Like most former Satanists, Marquis spent a great deal of time attempting to explain the occult symbolism of such things as the 1992 Olympic cauldron (it was red because Rothschild means “red shield”), Christmas wreaths (Pagan-Satanic vaginas), and the dollar bill (hexagrams and pentacles).

To give Marquis a small amount of credit, he didn’t try to convince anyone that Lovecraft’s Necronomicon is the central scripture of Satanism, or that soap operas are full of devil-worshiping gay men, as John Todd did.

Marquis also offered his services as an “occult crime expert” to law enforcement agencies, training officers how to investigate occult-related crimes or acting as a consultant. I don’t know if any agencies hired him, but Marquis did obtain a letter of recommendation from Chief Norman Connors of the Allenstown, Pennsylvania police. Apparently at Marquis’s request, Connors conducted an “extensive background” check on Marquis and found no evidence of illegal activity. This may have been good for his career as an occult crime consultant, but it certainly doesn’t say much for his reputation as a badass Illuminati Satanist that police couldn’t find a speck of criminal conduct in his background. (1)

Marquis drew in a few supporters, such as the late Ted Gunderson, Karen Kintella, (director of a Houston-based ritual abuse group called Valuable Information For Cult Traumatized Individuals And MPD Survivors, or VICTIMS), The Family International, Ken Adachi, and Pam Schuffert.

In 1999, Marquis published his autobiography, Memoirs of a Former Illuminati Witch (American Focus Publishing).
He had learned a valuable lesson from the ex-Satanists who preceded him. He knew their testimonies were discredited largely because they could not (or would not) provide any verifiable information. He neatly skirted this problem by admitting, straight up, that he had absolutely no intention of giving us any evidence to support his stories. His memoir would be Christian testimony, and nothing else. Essentially, he said, “I’m not going to back up anything I have to say. Deal with it.” He even admitted he was protecting the guilty, in order to prevent a Christian witch hunt. It seems his readiness to name names earlier in his career as an ex-witch hadn’t paid off; it’s much safer to offer up stories that are 100% free of falsifiable details. This will immediately get rid of any pesky nonbelievers who insist on stupid things like “facts” and “evidence”, and ensure that the people who continue to support you will be the most gullible, malleable followers available.

Marquis still talks a lot about occult symbols hidden in plain sight, the Illuminati’s New World Order plans, and Jesus. But his newest thing is predictions, or prophecies, involving conspiracies. He has ramped up the fear factor considerably. He says American concentration camps are being prepared for U.S. Christians, and claims to have been given a tour of one “death camp” in the Mojave desert. “As a former high level Illuminati planner for the New World Order, I was brought to the site of the future FEMA death camp in the Mojave. I knew exactly what it would be used for: the termination of Christian resisters of our ‘PLAN’ to seize this nation under martial law for our New World Order. My reaction when I stood within it’s deadly confines when a Satanist? Sheer joy! I rejoiced over the thought of Christians being terminated in this place.” That’s interesting. FEMA didn’t become active until after April 4, 1979 – about ten days before Doc left the Illuminati.
In May, on Stanley Monteith‘s radio show, he predicted that Obama may be assassinated by a Jewish person in 2012, and this would trigger an Islamic jihad against Israel because Obama is a closet Muslim. Boom, WWIII.

On August 20th, Marquis was a guest on Daniel Ott’s online radio show The Edge. A bio posted on the show’s website states Marquis trains mental health workers, FBI agents, and state and local police in recognizing and dealing with Satanic ritual abuse, Dissociative Identity Disorder and “programming/brainwashing” (he has no formal training in psychology). I can find no evidence that Marquis has given presentations to law enforcement or mental health professionals.

Marquis gave two presentations at this year’s Future Congress in July, and both consisted of very tired material. One was about the occult symbolism hidden in the D.C. street plan, U.S. dollar bills, and the Great Seal of the United States. Yawn. In the other presentation, he examined the illustrations used in the Illuminati card game to “prove how they planned Y2K, 9/11, the British Petroleum oil spill of 2010, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster of 2011, and other significant events years in advance”.

I’m not even going to waste time explaining why Marquis’s stories probably aren’t true. Everything he says is recycled conspiranoid drivel. If he wants the world to take him seriously as a Luciferian Illuminati witch, he can start by coming up with one infinitesimal speck of fresh information.

Sources:

1. Article on Joseph “Doc” Marquis by Kerr Cuhulain @ Witchvox
2. Unofficial transcript of Oprah June 24, 1987 broadcast
3. Xfamily.org entry for John Todd (Xfamily.org is run by former members of the Children of God/The Family International)
4.“America’s Occult Holidays” Prophecy Club presentation by Doc Marquis (c. 1997)