Magus (Golden Dawn)

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.

The Secret Chiefs, the governing authority the Golden Dawn's own teaching assigns to its Third Order, are themselves a publicly documented concept: general histories of the order describe the claim, recorded in Israel Regardie's published editions of the order's papers, that Magus and its two companion grades were understood as administered by this authority rather than by the order's ordinary Second Order structure.

Published scholarship on the Golden Dawn treats the Third Order as more a stated ideal within the grade structure than a tier the historical order regularly conferred, a point general accounts make explicitly when discussing how few members, if any, were formally recognized at this level through the original order's own administration.

Because the A A later adapted the same grade name and number for its own highest tier, general reference works on both orders discuss Magus as a point of direct published continuity between Crowley's system and the order he had left, distinguishing what the two organizations share from where their published teachings diverge.

General histories of the Golden Dawn treat the Secret Chiefs concept itself as one of the order's most discussed published ideas, cited repeatedly in later scholarship on both the Golden Dawn and the occult revival more broadly as a template for how a ceremonial order can claim authority beyond its own visible officers.