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Rebelling against Victorian religious and social strictures, occultist Aleister Crowley, soldier J. F. C. Fuller, and poet Victor Neuburg were active contributors and participants in the British secularist movement at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Friendship in Doubt examines how the Agnostic movement inspired and introduced them to each other as foundational figures in the new religious movement of Thelema.
Sommario
- CHAPTER ONE: THE AGNOSTICS
- CHAPTER TWO: CROWLEY AND RATIONALISM
- CHAPTER THREE: THE PRIZE
- CHAPTER FOUR: AGNOSTICS ON CAMPUS
- CHAPTER FIVE: BORROWED INFLUENCES
- CHAPTER SIX: CROWLEY VS. THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION
- CHAPTER SEVEN: FULLER and NEUBURG AFTER THE AGNOSTIC JOURNAL
- CHAPTER EIGHT: LIFE AFTER CROWLEY
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- ANTHOLOGY OF PRIMARY TEXTS BY ALEISTER CROWLEY, J. F. C. FULLER, AND VICTOR NEUBURG
Info autore
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 of Dentistry, and Yale University School of Medicine.
Riassunto
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-from Saladin'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 the new religious movement of Thelema. Agnosticism would inform not only Thelema, but also Crowley's publishing company S.P.R.T.; A⸫A⸫, 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 formative years of an emerging occult movement which would go on to exert an immense influence on Western esotericism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
