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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 22

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 22 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Thou, who doff the roots of Ocean [pontos] keep in seats caerulean, daemon of the deep,

2

Primary

With fifty nymphs (attending in thy train, fair virgin artists) glorying thro' the main:

3

Primary

The dark foundation of the rolling sea and Earth's wide bounds, belong much-fam'd to thee;

4

Primary

Great daemon, source of all, whose pow'r can make the Earth's [Deo's] unmeasur'd, holy basis shake,

5

Primary

When blust'ring winds in secret caverns pent, by thee excited, struggle hard for vent:

6

Primary

Come, blessed Nereus, listen to my pray'r, and cease to shake the earth with wrath severe;

7

Primary

Send on our sacred rites abundant 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 22.

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.