“W.W. Harmon’s Esoteric Manuscript - An Illustrated Presentation” is now online. 

In 1891, an optometrist and scholar named William W. Harmon began work on what would become a truly monumental metaphysical manuscript which has been hidden from sight for over 130 years. 284 pages in length, hand illustrated with gorgeous watercolors – some abstract in the style of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, others gloriously mystical in the style of William Blake – the “Esoteric Manuscript” as it’s currently labeled in the PRS Library Collections, is one of the great lost works of American esoteric art and writing. 

 Although he was known to Manly P. Hall and other members of esoteric circles in the early 20th century – Harmon contributed articles to Hall’s journal The All-Seeing Eye in the late 1920s – his work was, and continues to be, almost completely unknown outside of the metaphysical world. In 1949, scholar A.J. Howie wrote this about Harmon in Horizon, the PRS journal: “He was one of the first students of Theosophy in the United States to receive a copy of The Secret Doctrine. … Apparently because of his profession, he seems to have speculated considerably on the principles of light and color, with frequent references to tonal equivalents.” At some point after Harmon completed this massive work of mystical illustration and writing, the manuscript entered the collection of Manly P. Hall and PRS, where it’s remained in the Library vault for decades. 

 The quality of Harmon’s watercolor illustrations in the “Esoteric Manuscript” is stunning: dazzling rays of spectral light emanate from golden orbs, wheels of color rotate around a Zodiac. As a work of esoteric and metaphysical art and illustration, Harmon’s never-before-seen manuscript is, according to artist and esoteric scholar Michael Carter, “a seemingly singular historic document of the early New Age in America and it’s basically unknown outside of a small circle of people who have seen it in person at PRS.”