Douglas Harding Archive

Hand-written Manuscript of The Hierarchy

Douglas Harding wrote the hand-written draft of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth in the late 1940s. The typescript, the next version of this book, has some differences from the manuscript. As you will see, in this manuscript Douglas had not yet decided on the final title of the whole book. And the chapter numbers are slightly different in places from the later typescript, which is why there appears to be no chapter 20. This was a work in progress. (The order of the scanned pages is the order of the pages in the manuscript. Most pages are right-side pages, but in many instances Douglas attached material to the left-side page i.e. the back of the previous page, and these are all included in the order they appeared.) The manuscript (and the hand-written cards in the Card Index section) provide insight into how this extraordinary book evolved. 

(After the original large typescript, the next version was the synopsis which then evolved into a slightly expanded typed version followed eventually by the version of the book which was published by Faber & Faber in 1952.)

Photographs of the Manuscript