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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 13

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 13 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 11

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

2

Primary

Daughter of great Protogonus, divine, illustrious Rhea, to my pray'r incline,

3

Primary

Who driv'st thy holy car with speed along, drawn by fierce lions, terrible and strong.

4

Primary

Mother of Jove [Zeus], whose mighty arm can wield th' avenging bolt, and shake the dreadful shield.

5

Primary

Drum-beating, frantic, of a splendid mien, brass-sounding, honor'd, Saturn's [Kronos'] blessed queen.

6

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Thou joy'st in mountains and tumultuous fight, and mankind's horrid howlings, thee delight.

7

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War's parent, mighty, of majestic frame, deceitful saviour, liberating dame.

8

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Mother of Gods and men, from whom the earth [Gaia] and lofty heav'ns [Ouranos] derive their glorious birth;

9

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Th' aetherial gales, the deeply spreading sea goddess aerial form'd, proceed from thee.

10

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Come, pleas'd with wand'rings, blessed and divine, with peace attended on our labours shine;

11

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Bring rich abundance, and wherever found drive dire disease, to earth's remotest bound.

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 13.

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.