Friendship in Doubt

Abstract Friendship in Doubt explores the influence of the British Agnostic movement—from Saladin’s Agnostic Journal and George William Foote’s Freethinker to the Rationalist Press Association and its Literary Guide—on three founders of the twentieth-century new religious movement of Thelema. Agnosticism introduced occultist Aleister Crowley, soldier J. F. C. Fuller, and poet Victor Neuburg to each other, and it would inform Crowley’s publishing company, SPRT; A⸫A⸫, a successor to the fragmented Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the Equinox journal; and the concept of magick as Scientific Illuminism. Crowley’s, Fuller’s, and Neuburg’s essays and poems from the Agnostic literature, reprinted in Friendship in Doubt for the first time, shed light on their thinking at the start of their careers and provide a baseline from which to understand the subsequent trajectories of their lives.