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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 11

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 11 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 14

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear, pow'rful, Hercules [Herakles] untam'd and strong, to whom vast hands, and mighty works belong,

2

Primary

Almighty Titan, prudent and benign, of various forms, eternal and divine,

3

Primary

Father of Time [khronos], the theme of gen'ral praise, ineffable, ador'd in various ways.

4

Primary

Magnanimous, in divination skill'd and in the athletic labours of the field.

5

Primary

'Tis thine strong archer, all things to devour, supreme, all-helping, all-producing pow'r;

6

Primary

To thee mankind as their deliv'rer pray, whose arm can chase the savage tribes away:

7

Primary

Uweary'd, earth's best blossom, offspring fair, to whom calm peace, and peaceful works are dear.

8

Primary

Self-born, with primogenial fires you shine, and various names and strength of heart are thine.

9

Primary

Thy mighty head supports the morning light, and bears untam'd, the silent gloomy night;

10

Primary

From east to west endu'd with strength divine, twelve glorious labours to absolve is thine;

11

Primary

Supremely skill'd, thou reign'st in heav'n's abodes, thyself a God amid'st th' immortal Gods.

12

Primary

With arms unshaken, infinite, divine, come, blessed pow'r, and to our rites incline;

13

Primary

The mitigations of disease convey, and drive disasterous maladies away.

14

Primary

Come, shake the branch with thy almighty arm, dismiss thy darts and noxious fate disarm.

Text notes and edition context

Work

Orphic Hymns

The Orphic Hymns compress cosmology, prayer, ritual address, and divine epithets into compact devotional poems especially suited to meditative and oracle-like reading; the corpus now also carries an Abel-based Greek witness aligned as honestly as possible against the existing Taylor English sequence.

Hymns | Original language: Ancient Greek

Late Hellenistic to early Imperial Greek religious poetry, often dated between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE

You are reading Hymn 11.

Primary Edition

Thomas Taylor

English | Verse

Late 18th-century English verse translation

Taylor's version is archaic, charged, and openly mystical, making it one of the strongest public-domain oracle-friendly English renderings of the Orphic Hymns.

This edition uses canonical hymn numbering and line-level segmentation, omitting the prefatory Musaeus proem from the main corpus model.

Source family: English aggregate translations

Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi | Public-domain source texts

English prose and verse classics consolidated into a single aggregate dataset.

Primary source: English aggregate translations | Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi.