Calm down, Weatherall. I was picking up my kid. Don't be a spaz.

And I don't have to read every book to disagree with ideas.

It sounds like he purity spiraled out of masonry and gnosticism. because they weren't masonic and gnostic enough for him. Initiation is a gnostic concept. He turned tradition into a form of gnostic secret knowledge. It's a understandable confusion because modernity alienates us from our own heritage.

Then we feel empty, but we've been poisoned against our own culture and set adrift so we go looking down hidden rabbit holes for someone else's tradition. I suspect his young mind was poisoned by a modernist Jesuit.

Tradition is not an esoteric concept. I'm sad for him that he didn't find his way home. I hope you do.