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54 Achad’s work. The Ma-Ion Fellowship should not be confused with the later would-be rehabilita- tors of Achad, notably Kenneth Grant, who have no direct connection with Achad and have been much noisier about the “Aeon of Maat.” Achad himself, in his private correspondence of the period, shows no dogmatism, and none of the emotional in- stability later attributed to him, in much the same way that Crowley’s critics tended to dismiss his last years as a vegetative period of feeblemindedness. The Ma-Ion Fellowship continued a largely clandestine existence, gradually focus- ing upon the whole of Achad’s contribution to Thelema and his approach to the A:.A:. system, with much less emphasis upon the “Aeon of Maat” concept that he eventually questioned himself as perhaps premature. Achad claimed the 10 = 1 Grade in the A:.A:. in 1919, and is conceded by even the most conservative to have held 8 = 3 status. One student of Rosicrucian Occultism was Frater Robertus, a High Degree Freemason and Martinist who would eventually claim the 9 = 2 Grade, though, al- most certainly, not until well after Achad’s death in 1950. Robertus and his associates, as if following upon Achad’s suggestions and warrants, organized an order structure in line with Achad’s Qabalistic attributions, under the initials Q:.A:.A:. (Quabalistic Alchemist Arcanum). In 1960 the QAA organized as a Church, and shortly thereafter the A:.A:. style titles were dropped from public consideration along with the tell-tale “AA” in the initials “QAA” in favor of QBLH, the Qabalistic Alchemist Church. The QBLH continued, however, to teach something closely akin to Achad’s vision of the A:.A:. curriculum revised, based upon the New Aeon Qabalistic interpretation of The Book of the Law, and the restored Tree of Life following Achad’s point of departure from the arcane tradition. What kind of ideas are we talking about? The following quotations are gleaned from Achad’s very late private writings. If they are hard for the more orthodox to take, consider the rank and relative position in the A:.A:. structure of Charles Stansfeld Jones, or Frater Achad. “... in 1903 Aleister Crowley wrote his essay “Berashith’ in which he affirmed: I AS- SERT THE ABSOLUTENESS OF THE QABALISTIC ZERO and concluded that all things happened by CHANCE... “Against the assertion of the absoluteness of the Qabalistic Zero, and Crowley's ‘chance’ we affirm THE INFINITE PLENUM OF ALL PERFECTION which fills the Qabalis- tic Void ... there is the fact that I am just as much A.C.’s magical child, in fulfillment in a very real sense of Liber Legis, as ever I was. I can’t get away from that, any more than he could, whether either of us liked it or not. The proofs are overwhelming. “... we are dealing with a full-size world-mystery and a real fight between the Black and White Brotherhoods. “The Scientific Illuminism of the A:.A:. must continue. The System of initiation came to an end with the Aeon of Horus, but must be revised and continue according to New Aeon lines ... “I may well have been over optimistic in thinking that the Aeon of Truth and justice Allen H. Greenfield