Cambridge-educated, mountaineer, poet, and self-styled prophet, Aleister Crowley spent his life courting scandal and cultivating notoriety, and this film traces how a Victorian-era eccentric became one of the most quoted occultists of the twentieth century. It follows him from his strict Christian upbringing into ceremonial magic, his founding of the religion of Thelema built around the maxim "Do what thou wilt," and his attempts on Himalayan peaks that predate the era of modern expedition mountaineering. Newspapers of his day branded him the wickedest man in the world, a label he seems to have enjoyed and encouraged. The film traces his fingerprints on later countercultural movements, from occult revival groups to rock musicians who borrowed his imagery and ideas decades after his death. It treats him neither as pure villain nor misunderstood genius, presenting a poet and provocateur whose theatrical self-invention outlasted the scandals that made him famous in his own lifetime.