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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 12

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 12 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Etherial father, mighty Titan, hear, great fire of Gods and men, whom all revere:

2

Primary

Endu'd with various council, pure and strong, to whom perfection and decrease belong.

3

Primary

Consum'd by thee all forms that hourly die, by thee restor'd, their former place supply;

4

Primary

The world immense in everlasting chains, strong and ineffable thy pow'r contains

5

Primary

Father of vast eternity, divine, O mighty Saturn [Kronos], various speech is thine:

6

Primary

Blossom of earth and of the starry skies, husband of Rhea, and Prometheus wife.

7

Primary

Obstetric Nature, venerable root, from which the various forms of being shoot;

8

Primary

No parts peculiar can thy pow'r enclose, diffus'd thro' all, from which the world arose,

9

Primary

O, best of beings, of a subtle mind, propitious hear to holy pray'rs inclin'd;

10

Primary

The sacred rites benevolent attend, and grant a blameless life, a blessed end.

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 12.

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.