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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 29

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 29 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Bacchus [Dionysos] I call, loud-sounding and divine, fanatic God, a two-fold shape is thine:

2

Primary

Thy various names and attributes I sing, O, first-born, thrice begotten, Bacchic king:

3

Primary

Rural, ineffable, two-form'd, obscure, two-horn'd, with ivy crown'd, euion, pure.

4

Primary

Bull-fac'd, and martial, bearer of the vine, endu'd with counsel prudent [Eubouleos] and divine:

5

Primary

Triennial, whom the leaves of vines adorn, of Jove [Zeus] and Proserpine [Persephoneia], occultly born.

6

Primary

Immortal daemon, hear my suppliant voice, give me in blameless plenty to rejoice;

7

Primary

And listen gracious to my mystic pray'r, surrounded with thy choir of nurses fair.

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 29.

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.