Friendship in Doubt

Infidel. Atheist. Rationalist. Agnostic. Occultist Aleister Crowley, soldier J. F. C. Fuller, and poet Victor Neuburg embraced these labels as active contributors and participants in the British secularist movement at the dawn of the twentieth century. Rebelling against Victorian religious and social strictures, they dreamed of a world guided by scientific evidence instead of superstition. Friendship in Doubt examines how the Agnostic movement-fromSaladin's Agnostic Journal and G. W. Foote's Freethinker, to the Rationalist Press Association and its Literary Guide--inspired and introduced Crowley, Fuller, and Neuburg to each other as foundational figures in thenew religious movement of Thelema. Agnosticism would inform not only Thelema, but also Crowley's publishing company S.P.R.T.; AooAoo, a successor to the fragmented Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the Equinox journal; and the concept of "magick" as Scientific Illuminism. This volume also collects for the first time the contributions of all three to the Agnostic literature. This scarce and largely unknown material provides insight into the thinking of Crowley,Fuller and Neuburg at the start of their careers, and an understanding of their subsequent trajectories after they parted ways. As such, it provides unique insights into the role of Agnosticism in the formativeyears of an emerging occult movement which would go on to exert an immense influence on Western esotericism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Friendship in Doubt study makes a strong argument for the often-overlooked influence that agnosticism exerted on some currents of Western esotericism. Kaczynski has already established himself as an accomplished biographer with his Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley and is now proving himself equally adept in the field of intellectual biography. Gordan Djurdjevic, Author of India and the Occult: The Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism
With meticulous attention to historical detail as well as an expertly edited collection of primary sources made available to readers for the first time, Kaczynski - an internationally recognized authority on the topic-not only provides novel insights on Crowley, Fuller, and Neuburg and their respective relationships, but also sheds novel light on the relationship between the agnostic/secularist movement and twentieth-century esotericism. Manon Hedenborg White, Author of The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism
Friendship in Doubt weaves the key figures of the rationalist movement into its narrative, making skilful use of previously unexplored source material to bring these characters to life. The book is a masterful combination of scholarly insight and biographical storytelling. Deja Whitehouse, Author of The Lady and the Beast: The Extraordinary Partnership between Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley

Richard Kaczynski is an independent scholar of Western Esotericism, best known for the biography Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (2010). He publishes and presents widely, including with the Association for the Study of Esotericism and Trans-States (for which he was a keynote speaker in 2016). As a statistician, he has held academic positions with the Wayne State University School of Medicine, University of Detroit Mercy School ofDentistry, and Yale University School of Medicine.

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