London in the 1880s was a city unsettled by industrialization and hungry for meaning outside the church, and into that gap stepped the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The film traces its founding by William Wescott, William Robert Woodman, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who claimed authority from cryptic 'Cipher Manuscripts' and unseen 'Secret Chiefs' guiding them from beyond. It walks through the order's curriculum of Hermetic Qabalah, alchemy, and ritual magic, and the unusual decision to admit women as full members alongside men. Notable initiates get their due, including poet W.B. Yeats, before the story turns to Aleister Crowley, whose ambitions helped fracture the group from within. Rivalries and schisms splinter the order into competing factions, and the film follows its slow disintegration through to 1939. Along the way it argues for the Golden Dawn's afterlife: the rituals, symbols, and hierarchies that later occultists and popular magical traditions borrowed directly from what these Victorians assembled in secret.