Daily Inspiration Quote by Aleister Crowley

Crowley’s “wholesome” is a trapdoor word: it smuggles the language of moral hygiene into a sentence meant to scandalize moral hygienists. In early-20th-century Britain, “paganism” wasn’t a neutral descriptor; it was a taunt aimed at Victorian piety, a refusal of Christian austerity, and a flirtation with the forbidden. Crowley, professional heretic and self-mythologist, uses the term as both shield and spear. He’s not trying to rehabilitate ancient temples so much as to discredit the moral economy that calls desire dirty and the body suspect.

The line works because it reframes “facing the facts” as an ethical achievement. “Facts of life” is doing double duty: the banal truism adults tell children, and a coded insistence on sex, appetite, mortality, power. Crowley implies that mainstream religion survives by editing reality - laundering messiness into doctrine - while paganism, in his telling, keeps the ledger honest. That posture lets him sell transgression as maturity: if you can look at lust, death, and chaos without flinching, you’re healthier than the person praying them away.

There’s also a strategic inversion here. “Wholesome” usually means domesticated, socially approved. Crowley hijacks it to crown the unsanctioned as the truly sane. Subtext: the real sickness is denial; the real virtue is appetite disciplined by clarity rather than shame. In the cultural moment of spiritual experimentation, occult revival, and postwar disillusion, the line reads less like theology than like a manifesto for living without euphemism.