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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 14

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 14 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Jove much-honor'd, Jove [Zeus] supremely great, to thee our holy rites we consecrate,

2

Primary

Our pray'rs and expiations, king divine, for all things round thy head exalted shine.

3

Primary

The earth is thine, and mountains swelling high, the sea profound, and all within the sky.

4

Primary

Saturnian [Kronion] king, descending from above, magnanimous, commanding, sceptred Jove [Zeus];

5

Primary

All-parent, principle and end of all, whose pow'r almighty, shakes this earthly ball;

6

Primary

Ev'n Nature trembles at thy mighty nod, loud-sounding, arm'd with light'ning, thund'ring God.

7

Primary

Source of abundance, purifying king, O various-form'd from whom all natures spring;

8

Primary

Propitious hear my pray'r, give blameless health, with peace divine, and necessary wealth.

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 14.

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.