"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach"
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Crowley aims straight at the oldest cheap trick in public life: confuse curiosity with contagion. His line lands because it indicts a reflex that still runs entire moral panics - the idea that to examine a “heresy” is to secretly desire it, that attention equals endorsement. He frames the world’s “conscience” as not merely judgmental but guilty, projecting its own anxieties onto the investigator. The psychological jab is tidy: a culture unsure of its virtue polices inquiry to avoid hearing what it fears it might recognize in itself.
The leprosy metaphor does double duty. It’s vivid, and it’s strategic: medicine is socially sanctioned contact with the taboo. By analogizing heresy-hunting to clinical study, Crowley tries to launder controversial inquiry through the prestige of science. That’s not an accident from a man who built a career on occupying the role of scandal: occultist as research scientist, blasphemy as experiment, transgression as method.
Context matters because Crowley is writing in the long shadow of Victorian and Edwardian respectability, when censorship and obscenity laws treated knowledge as a pollutant. “Only recently” gestures toward the modern settlement where laboratories, universities, and journals carve out protected zones of investigation. But he also needles that settlement’s fragility: the permission is conditional, easily revoked when the subject crosses from germs to sex, religion, politics - the places where societies most need inquiry and most fear what it will uncover.
His subtext is self-defense and offense at once: if you condemn my study, you admit your own bad faith.
The leprosy metaphor does double duty. It’s vivid, and it’s strategic: medicine is socially sanctioned contact with the taboo. By analogizing heresy-hunting to clinical study, Crowley tries to launder controversial inquiry through the prestige of science. That’s not an accident from a man who built a career on occupying the role of scandal: occultist as research scientist, blasphemy as experiment, transgression as method.
Context matters because Crowley is writing in the long shadow of Victorian and Edwardian respectability, when censorship and obscenity laws treated knowledge as a pollutant. “Only recently” gestures toward the modern settlement where laboratories, universities, and journals carve out protected zones of investigation. But he also needles that settlement’s fragility: the permission is conditional, easily revoked when the subject crosses from germs to sex, religion, politics - the places where societies most need inquiry and most fear what it will uncover.
His subtext is self-defense and offense at once: if you condemn my study, you admit your own bad faith.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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