Aleister Crowley spent his life courting scandal, from ceremonial magic and open drug use to a reputation that got him branded, in the tabloids of his day, the wickedest man in the world. This film traces that reputation back to its sources: his early training in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, his founding of the magical order Argenteum Astrum, and the religion he built out of both, Thelema, which still has practicing followers. Archival photographs and expert interviews cover his heroin and cocaine use, his sexual relationships outside the norms of Edwardian Britain, and the abuse allegations that have followed his name since. The film does not try to rehabilitate him so much as separate the documented record from the myth he cultivated himself, since Crowley was as much a self-publicist as an occultist. It closes on the question of his afterlife in culture, why a man reviled in his own time became a fixture of twentieth-century counterculture and modern esoteric practice.