Daily Inspiration Quote by Aleister Crowley

Crowley’s line is less a diagnosis of sex than an indictment of moral theater. He’s arguing that “public horror” at “sexual irregularity so-called” isn’t primarily about protecting anyone from harm; it’s a socially useful panic fueled by recognition. The sting sits in “so-called”: a little razor that exposes how “irregularity” is often just a label slapped onto whatever a given era, church, or state wants to police. Crowley, the self-mythologizing occultist and provocateur, knew exactly how to press the bruise: he frames outrage as a confession disguised as condemnation.

The subtext is aggressively psychological. People don’t react with horror because they’re pure; they react because the taboo is familiar. “Everyone knows himself essentially guilty” isn’t meant as a theological claim so much as an accusation of hypocrisy: the crowd’s disgust is a way to externalize its own fantasies, failures, and desires, then punish them at a safe distance. Shame becomes a civic ritual. You get to feel clean by throwing stones.

Context matters: early 20th-century Britain was saturated with moral regulation, criminalized homosexuality, and anxieties about “degeneracy,” even as private lives routinely defied official codes. Crowley is speaking from inside that contradiction, and he’s also protecting his own project: if the public’s standards are exposed as performative and self-serving, then his transgressive philosophy (“Do what thou wilt”) looks less like depravity and more like honesty.

It works because it flips the usual power dynamic. The accused become the mirror; the judges, the defendants.