Portal, The Golden Dawn's Bridging Grade

Portal is the bridging grade of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, conferred after the five First Order grades, Neophyte through Philosophus, and before the Second Order begins with Adeptus Minor. It does not carry a grade number in the order's 0=0 style notation, unlike every numbered grade on either side of it, a structural marker of its transitional rather than sequential place in the system.

The Second Order that Portal leads into is also known as the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, the Ruby Rose and Golden Cross, a name distinct from the First Order's own titles and reflecting the order's internal division into administratively and ritually separate tiers. Passing through Portal marks the point at which a Golden Dawn member's studies shift from the First Order's elemental framework to the Second Order's own distinct material.

The order's founding in 1888, by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman, and its adaptation of grade names and structure from the earlier Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, is documented in the scholarly history of the order, including studies of the internal conflicts that eventually split the Golden Dawn into successor bodies in the early twentieth century, conflicts that in several cases turned on exactly this boundary between the First and Second Orders and who was entitled to administer it.