Greetings of the Vernal Equinox!

The Frater Achad Catalogue

Charles Stansfeld Jones (1886-1950), aka Frater Achad, was an Aspirant to the A.'.A.'.who took the Oath of the grade of Babe of the Abyss as a Neophyte, which is the right of the Neophyte to do. He also became an O.T.O. initiate, serving in a leadership capacity in British Columbia.

Having been recruited through The Equinox in 1909, Jones was the twentieth person to join the A.'.A.'. under Aliester Crowley. Jones' motto as a Probationer was Vnvs in Omnibvs (V.I.O.), and his supervising Neophyte was J.F.C. Fuller (Per Ardua). When Fuller resigned from the order, Aleister Crowley took over as Jones' superior and advanced him to Neophyte, where he would take the motto Achad, and which unexpectedly opened several doors for Crowley.

The news came as a profound revelation to Crowley. Nine months earlier he had been involved in a set of sex-magical operations with Soror Hilarion (Jeanne Foster) in an apparently unsuccessful effort to conceive a child. Crowley noted the nine-month interval and concluded that Jones' "birth" as a 'Babe of the Abyss' qualified him as the "magical child" of Crowley and Hilarion. He took Jones into the Supernal Triad, and declared him to be his Magickal Childe prophesied AL:I.55-56. As Crowley later wrote:

What I had really done was therefore to beget a Magical Son [in a magical operation]. So, precisely nine months afterwards, that is, at the summer solstice of 1916, Frater O.I.V. (the name of C. Stansfeld Jones as a probationer) entirely without my knowledge became a Babe of the Abyss.

Crowley goes on to cite a number of proofs, relying upon the expected child in The Book of the Law. "It is further predicted," Crowley goes on, that his 'Child' shall discover the Key of the interpretation of the Book itself, and this I was unable to do … in actual fact he did so discover that Key.

FRATER V.I.O. (also called Frater Achad, Parzival, Arctaeon and O.I.V. V.I.O.).Portrait by Henry B. CampAchad's unorthodox qabalistic views led to a permanent break with Crowley in 1919 ev. Crowley would intimate in Magick In Theory and Practice that Achad's turning of the Tree upside-down, showed him to have failed the Ordeal of the Abyss. Yet there is some evidence to show Achad at one point renounced the folly of his ways and tried to get back with Crowley.

In 1921, Jones joined the Universal Brotherhood (U.B.), also known as the Integral Fellowship or as the Mahacakra Society (or M.); all pertaining to various levels of the organization. This group interestingly enough, actively recruited among Theosophists for some time and membership expanded effortlessly. And in 1924, Jones formed a plan for incorporating Thelemic philosophical concepts into the U.B. as a Grama or "Integral Body," which he claimed would be presented "in their pure form." He communicated this idea to Wilfred T. Smith, who was at that time his subordinate in both the U.B. and A.'.A.'.

Annie Besant, head of the Theosophical Society at that time, strictly forbade cross-membership in the U.B. And as Crowley became aware of the involvement of his followers, he likewise denounced the U.B., calling it a "swindle" in correspondence with Jones. Many of those who left the Theosophical Society for the U.B. under pressure from Besant later converted to Roman Catholicism.

In 1928, Jones became a member of the Roman Catholic Church, undergoing baptism and confirmation into the laity of the church. The true aims of the U.B. remain obscure, but they were held suspect by Wilfred T. Smith, among others, of acting as a front for Roman Catholic infiltration of occult groups; and by former Golden Dawn member Paul Foster Case of being inspired by the Bavarian Illuminati.