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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 24

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 24 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Proteus I call, whom Fate decrees, to keep the keys which lock the chambers of the deep;

2

Primary

First-born, by whose illustrious pow'r alone all Nature's principles are clearly shewn:

3

Primary

Matter to change with various forms is thine, matter unform'd, capacious, and divine.

4

Primary

All-honor'd, prudent, whose sagacious mind knows all that was, and is, of ev'ry kind,

5

Primary

With all that shall be in succeeding time; so vast thy wisdom, wond'rous, and sublime:

6

Primary

For all things Nature first to thee consign'd, and in thy essence omniform confin'd.

7

Primary

Come, blessed father, to our rites attend, and grant our happy lives a prosp'rous 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 24.

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.