Adeptus Minor, numbered 5=6, is a grade of the A A that the order's own literature treats as a major turning point in its ten grade sequence, corresponding to the grade of the same name and number in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, from which the A A adapted its structure. It falls between the order's outer grades and the higher grades that follow, occupying the same threshold position within the A A that Adeptus Minor holds at the opening of the Golden Dawn's own Second Order.
The A A was founded in the early twentieth century by former Golden Dawn members, chiefly Aleister Crowley, in the years following that order's internal schisms around 1900, and it published its grade structure and requirements in The Equinox, the order's own periodical, a level of public documentation the Golden Dawn's comparable material did not receive until much later, largely through Israel Regardie's own published editions decades afterward.
Because the numbering and name carry directly over from the Golden Dawn, Adeptus Minor in the A A is frequently discussed in the scholarship on both orders as the clearest single point of structural continuity between Crowley's system and the order he had left, even where the two systems diverge sharply in other respects.