Adeptus Major, numbered 6=5, is the second grade of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's Second Order, following Adeptus Minor and preceding Adeptus Exemptus. The Second Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, the Ruby Rose and Golden Cross, is administratively and ritually distinct from the outer First Order that precedes it, a division the order maintained from its 1888 founding by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman onward.
The grade name and numbering follow the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia's equivalent grade in its own nine grade sequence, the source the Golden Dawn's founders drew on for the order's structure generally. Where the SRIA reserved advancement into its own Second Order, Grades V through VII, to its Provinces rather than its local Colleges, the Golden Dawn's Second Order carried a comparably elevated administrative status within its own system.
The scholarly history of the Golden Dawn, drawing on surviving order papers and the accounts of members including Israel Regardie, documents the Second Order as the site of the order's most consequential internal disputes, particularly around 1900, when disagreements over Mathers's authority and the order's direction led to schisms that produced several successor bodies, each claiming its own continuation of the Second Order's grade structure.