Aleister Crowley joins the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a young man and spends the rest of his life colliding with nearly everyone in it. He clashes with William Butler Yeats and Arthur Edward Waite, calling Waite a "pretentious bore" in the pages of his periodical The Equinox, and turns on his early mentor Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers so thoroughly that the two end up in a copyright lawsuit. The film follows him to Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, where he retreats into isolation and magical study, and traces his experiments with Raja Yoga through to a state he called dhyana, reached in 1901. A stretch in Mexico produces the word "Abrahadabra," which becomes central to his later writing. Essays like Berashith and Science and Matter show him trying to argue for mysticism on empirical grounds rather than faith alone. The film stays close to these documented episodes rather than the legend, tracking a man who built and burned relationships with equal speed across the occult circles of his era.