Reader

Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 2

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 2 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 9

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Night [Nyx], parent goddess, source of sweet repose, from whom at first both Gods and men arose,

2

Primary

Hear, blessed Venus [Kypris], deck'd with starry light, in sleep's deep silence dwelling Ebon night!

3

Primary

Dreams and soft case attend thy dusky train, pleas'd with the length'ned gloom and feaftful strain.

4

Primary

Dissolving anxious care, the friend of Mirth, with darkling coursers riding round the earth.

5

Primary

Goddess of phantoms and of shadowy play, whose drowsy pow'r divides the nat'ral day:

6

Primary

By Fate's decree you constant send the light to deepest hell, remote from mortal sight

7

Primary

For dire Necessity which nought withstands, invests the world with adamantine bands.

8

Primary

Be present, Goddess, to thy suppliant's pray'r, desir'd by all, whom all alike revere,

9

Primary

Blessed, benevolent, with friendly aid dispell the fears of Twilight's dreadful shade.

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 2.

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.