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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 26

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 26 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Mother of Gods [Meter Theon], great nurse of all, draw near, divinely honor'd, and regard my pray'r:

2

Primary

Thron'd on a car, by lions drawn along, by bull-destroying lions, swift and strong,

3

Primary

Thou sway'st the sceptre of the pole divine, and the world's middle seat, much-fam'd, is thine.

4

Primary

Hence earth is thine, and needy mortals share their constant food, from thy protecting care:

5

Primary

From thee at first both Gods and men arose; from thee, the sea and ev'ry river flows.

6

Primary

Vesta [Hestia], and source of good, thy name we find to mortal men rejoicing to be kind;

7

Primary

For ev'ry good to give, thy soul delights; come, mighty pow'r, propitious to our rites,

8

Primary

All-taming, blessed, Phrygian saviour, come, Saturn's [Kronos'] great queen, rejoicing in the drum.

9

Primary

Celestial, ancient, life-supporting maid, fanatic Goddess, give thy suppliant aid;

10

Primary

With joyful aspect on our incense shine, and, pleas'd, accept the sacrifice divine.

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 26.

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.