s 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 w