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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 23

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 23 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Daughters of Nereus, resident in caves merg'd deep in Ocean, sporting thro' the waves;

2

Primary

Fanatic fifty nymphs [Nymphai Einalioi], who thro' the main delight to follow in the Triton's train,

3

Primary

Rejoicing close behind their cars to keep; whose forms half wild, are nourish'd by the deep,

4

Primary

With other nymphs of different degree leaping and wand'ring thro' the liquid sea:

5

Primary

Bright, wat'ry dolphins, sonorous and gay, well pleas'd to sport with bachanalian play;

6

Primary

Nymphs beauteous-ey'd, whom sacrifice delights, send rich abundance on our mystic rites;

7

Primary

For you at first disclos'd the rites divine, of holy Bacchus [Bakkhos] and of Proserpine [Phersephoneia],

8

Primary

Of fair Calliope from whom I spring, and of Apollo bright, the Muse's king.

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 23.

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.