Associate is the first of the three founding degrees of the Martinist Order, the initiatory society drawing on the theurgical Christian mysticism of Louis Claude de Saint Martin, from whom it takes its name. It precedes Initiate and Superior Unknown, the order's original three degree sequence as established by Papus, the pen name of Gerard Encausse, in the late nineteenth century.
Saint Martin himself, an eighteenth century French mystic who wrote under the name the Unknown Philosopher, was not the order's founder but its inspiration: the Martinist Order Papus organized drew its theurgical orientation from Saint Martin's own writings and, further back, from the Elus Cohen tradition of Martinez de Pasqually, the theurgic teacher whose ideas shaped Saint Martin's earlier formation before Saint Martin moved toward the more contemplative, less overtly ceremonial mysticism associated with his own later work.
Some later Martinist bodies have expanded this original three degree structure with additional grades, a pattern of organizational splintering and elaboration common to French esoteric societies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Associate, Initiate and Superior Unknown remain the founding sequence from which those later expansions all descend.