G. Gordon Liddy, as related, undertook many extreme acts—he cooked and ate a rat as a child, he stood right next to express trains, he electrocuted himself to overcome his fear of electricity, and he tied himself to a tree in a thunderstorm to confront electricity in its most pure form—lightning.
So was he an initiate?
No—his acts were profane initiation and only worked at the mundane psychological level, though he may have sometimes activated the magical will by accident.
In the 1980s, there were men, men like the poet Robert Bly, who spoke about the male need for initiation—and how it has been lost in modernity.
Bly was a leftist who only worshipped the mundane stars, not the eternal stars—and that was why he became a “star” on the NYT bestseller list.
His “initiation” was culled from the myths of the world, from African spider-men and chthonic drumming—and he was ridiculed for that (mythopoeic men off in their garages drumming away).
In a similar vein, a right-wing vein, you might think Liddy “initiated” himself—he did all these extreme acts to test himself, to “self-overbecome”.
And the military is like that—“it makes a man out of you” because you go in as a cocky teenager and they shave off your hair, remove your egotistic identity, and then program you with a new faceless routine so that you are just an instrument.
You abnegate yourself so that you can rise up—only those who serve can lead.
It’s a cybernetic process—the programming you had at home, your mother’s love and your little consumer world, is replaced with a hard indifferent process; and when you internalise that new program, you can dominate any environment—and that’s why, as they say, “it gives him a skill”.
You leave the military, in the ideal form, with an “OODA loop” and similar programs internalised—so that if you want to start your own boot repair shop you can do that, because you think in strategic terms “ends - ways - means”.
That is what Liddy made himself, as a keen soldier and a soldier before he was a soldier—but that is just to make yourself a machine-man, it is not real initiation.
Real initiation is to awaken the serpent that is dormant within yourself—to break into the transcendent realm, to achieve union with the Godhead.
It can involve “extreme” acts or acts that defy norms or challenge your natural aversions (perhaps you must walk over a high scaffolding pole between two buildings, because you always feared heights).
But the purpose is not to turn you into a “robo-man” or an indifferent man of steel who feels nothing—as Liddy burned himself with flames down to the bones, until his nerves were literally dead.
That is what it means to be “a real man” in modernity, because we no longer understand the transcendent world—the higher world has been lost to us, and so what you will learn from any “masculinity guru”, from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate, is how to be a “machine-man”.
How to be “an operator”, as the special forces say, and just to be a blunt force—until you break down like Peterson or are arrested like Tate (hard things snap, but water never breaks).
True initiation awakens the transcendent view within you, the third eye (the waters)—and that can mean no physical movement at all, because it is about access to a spiritual realm.
It means that you can appear to people in their dreams at will—as I do—but you may do that and never leave your room, because true action acts without moving; it doesn’t work in the mundane world at all, it only works through the spiritual realm.
Today, people think action is to get on a jet or drive a fast sports car—that is all false action, action of no real consequence.
And just to be an “action man” or to copy Red Indian initiation rites will not make you an “initiate” or “a man”.
Liddy wasn’t a “real man”, despite all his extreme acts—he was possessed by a spirit of vengeance and the desire for material success.
This is why men like Nixon and Liddy—the plotters and schemers—always lose in the end. Their opponents are no better, worse in most respects, but these “men of the right” are also deluded—being men of iron and blood.
If Liddy contacted the transcendent realm, if, when he tied himself to a tree in a lightning storm, he came near Thor (his obsession with Hitler being partly related to the blood memories of his ancestors) then that contact was an accident—his goal was to make himself into an unfeeling machine-man, not to awaken the sleeper within.
True initiation involves symbolic creation, internal travel, to go out into the wilderness and spend a night in darkness alone—not to drum with a group of men, or to tie yourself to a tree in a lightning storm.
One makes you into the soppy servant of the feminine collective, the other into a hard machine-man who is controlled by dark forces.
It is more important to see the stars, to see the black sky—to see the infinite.
This is why I am neither left nor right—neither the soft woman nor the hard man.
I am Parsifal, I am the Pure Fool (pierced-through-the-heart).
Gordon Liddy was not an initiate, and neither was Robert Bly.