—­Now Math—­he was a famous wizard of old—­means ‘sort,’ ‘kind’; and so implies such ideas as ‘differentiation,’ ‘heterogeneity.’  To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination, the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world of separatenesses;—­as for being ‘enchanted by Gwydion,’ that name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit Vidya, or Budha; he is the ‘Purifier’ of those ’Five Battalions of—­’Celfyddon,’ the word is ‘artists,’ ’skillful ones’; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word Celi, ‘occult’ or ‘secret’; so that being ‘enchanted by’ him would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom.  It is difficult for a student of symbolism not to believe that there were Theosophical activities in fifth- and sixth-century Britain.

Another glimpse of the feeling of the age you get in the two oldest Arthurian romances:  The Dream of Rhonobwy, and Culhwch and Olwen. They were written, in the form in which we have them, not until the last centuries of Welsh independence,—­when there was another national illumination; and indeed all the literature of this early time comes to us through the bards of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  They transmitted it; wrote it down; added to and took away from it; altered it:  a purely brain-mind scholarship might satisfy itself that they invented it; but criticism, to be of any use at all, must be endowed with a certain delicacy and intuition; it must rely on better tools than the brain-mind.  Matthew Arnold, who had such qualifications, compared the work of the later bards to peasants’ huts built on and of the ruins of Ephesus; and it is still easier for us, with the light Theosophy throws on all such subjects, to see the greater and more ancient work through the less and later.  I shall venture to quote from Culhwch and Olwen: a passage that some of you may know very well already.  Culhwch the son of Cilydd the son of the Prince of Celyddon rides out to seek the help of Arthur: 

“And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle of costly gold.  In his hands were two spears of silver, sharp, well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind and cause blood to flow, and that faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at its heaviest.  A gold-hilted sword was at his side, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven; his war-horn was of ivory.  Before him were two brindled white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear.  And the one that was on the right side bounded across to the left side,