001 C&G Trade Paper - The Hank Harrison Portal Gateway

Foreword
In 1976, I was granted a chance to study with the late
Dame Frances Yates at the Warburg Institute near the
University of London. Yates, the author of a number of
definitive works on the Renaissance, was greatly celebrated
for her research techniques and writing style. She
stood about five foot ten in her stocking feet, I know this
because she often took off her shoes in her office. In spite
of her eccentricity, exemplified by chain-smoking and a
preoccupation with leopard-skin pill box hats, I was fairly
sure I was in the presence of genius. Anyone who
attended even one of her lectures will know what I mean.
I have no idea why she selected me but, as she told me
privately, I was the kind of American she liked. She
didn’t like my preoccupation with “secret societies” and
“hocus-pocus,” but she thought I was fresh and at least
on the right track. She confided eventually that she
expressed a distaste for American academics, finding them
even stuffier than the British.
Dame Frances could speak three live, and two dead,
languages interchangeably. She could drain you of your
last intellectual breath one minute then pick you up and
race you to the heights of intellectual quest the next. This
was obviously good for me. She gave me an insight into
the tools and discipline I would need and encouraged me
to continue. I regret she could not see the finished work.
Between 1970 and 1982 I managed to visit and film
most of the sites covered in the academic literature, at
least once. I was sure I was observing traces of an organized
archaic religion — possibly traces of a global
Paleolithic religion — that could prove to be the oldest
on Earth. I could clearly see that the Round Table myths
were not Christian, at least not originally. This realization
led me into a wandering state of shock, something
everyone, tangled in the Grail web, must experience.
Because I went through the Zen monastery system in
California, I realized the exhilaration I was feeling was a
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