Magus, numbered 9=2, is the second grade of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's Third Order, following Magister Templi and preceding Ipsissimus. The name is shared with the equivalent grade in the A A, which adapted the Golden Dawn's grade structure after Crowley's own departure from the older order.
The order's own teaching holds the Third Order, Magister Templi, Magus and Ipsissimus together, to be governed by the Secret Chiefs rather than conferred through the Second Order's ordinary administration, a claim that set the Third Order apart institutionally from the First and Second from the order's 1888 founding by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman onward. In practice, the scholarly history of the order notes that few if any members were ever formally recognized at this level through the original Golden Dawn's own administration, making the Third Order more a stated ideal within the grade structure than a tier the order regularly conferred.
Because the A A, founded by former Golden Dawn members in the early twentieth century, adapted the same numbered grade and the same Tree of Life correspondence for its own Third Order, Magus's name and number carry forward into a separate tradition with its own distinct history, documented separately in this atlas under the A A's own grade of the same name.