Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep

Hear the fierce and unsettling cry of Aleister Crowley, the rebel of spirit and seeker of forbidden truths: “Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.” At first, these words seem to rage against society itself, and indeed they do. Yet within the fury lies a profound lament: that humanity, once wild and noble, has been caged by artificial rules, stripped of its intimacy with the earth, and intoxicated by illusions meant to keep it tame.

For Crowley saw in modern morality not the triumph of virtue, but its distortion. Morality, born in its purest form from harmony with the natural order, had in his day hardened into a weapon of suppression. Instead of guiding men toward balance, it shamed them for their instincts. Instead of teaching reverence for life’s mysteries, it clothed them in superstition and fear. Thus, the raw impulses of the human soul—hunger, passion, courage, wonder—were branded as sins, and in their place, people were fed bogey tales of punishment and shame.

Consider the tale of the Middle Ages, when natural inquiry was branded heresy, and the truths of the facts of nature—the stars, the body, the earth—were buried beneath dogma. Galileo, who dared to look through his telescope and say, “The earth moves,” was silenced, not because his words lacked truth, but because the guardians of morality feared the collapse of their control. Here was Crowley’s prophecy made flesh: a people kept ignorant, intoxicated not by knowledge but by terror of myths designed to bind them.

Yet Crowley did not despise morality itself, nor the forms of custom that guard civilization. Rather, he despised manners and codes that are empty shells, masks without substance, rules that serve to enslave rather than enlighten. He called for a return to natural instincts, not to chaos, but to authenticity. To know hunger, and eat without shame. To feel desire, and express it without hypocrisy. To look upon the stars, the mountains, the seas, and learn their laws not through myth, but through reverent observation. For in nature lies a law deeper and truer than the invented laws of men.

This tension has echoed in every age. Recall Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” His chains were not iron, but conventions, hierarchies, and falsehoods woven by society. So too Crowley warns us: beware the bogey tales that keep you docile. Beware the teachings that vilify your instincts while offering no path to truth. For in denying the natural, one becomes not virtuous but fractured—torn between the mask demanded by society and the truth pulsing in the blood.

But let us take wisdom, not despair, from this. For the lesson is not that all morality is corruption, but that true morality must grow from truth. If we would live fully, we must educate ourselves in the facts of nature: in the cycles of the body, the laws of the earth, the wonders of the cosmos. We must recognize that our instincts are not enemies, but powers to be guided with discipline and love. And we must strip away the bogey tales that intoxicate us with fear, replacing them with stories that inspire courage, honesty, and harmony.

Therefore, children of the future, do not live shackled by empty manners. Do not despise your natural instincts, for they are the raw material of your humanity. Instead, seek to know them, to refine them, to direct them toward creation rather than destruction. Read the book of nature—in science, in art, in silence beneath the stars. In this way, you shall not be drunk on falsehoods, but awakened by truth. Crowley’s cry, though wrapped in defiance, is a call to authenticity: to live not as slaves of fear, but as beings who embrace the miracle of nature within and without, and in so doing, become fully alive.