Reader

Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 31

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 31 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 12

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Only-Begotten, noble race of Jove, blessed and fierce, who joy'st in caves to rove:

2

Primary

O, warlike Pallas, whose illustrious kind, ineffable and effable we find:

3

Primary

Magnanimous and fam'd, the rocky height, and groves, and shady mountains thee delight:

4

Primary

In arms rejoicing, who with Furies dire and wild, the souls of mortals dost inspire.

5

Primary

Gymnastic virgin of terrific mind, dire Gorgons bane, unmarried, blessed, kind:

6

Primary

Mother of arts, imperious; understood, rage to the wicked., wisdom to the good:

7

Primary

Female and male, the arts of war are thine, fanatic, much-form'd dragoness [Drakaina], divine:

8

Primary

O'er the Phlegrean giants rous'd to ire, thy coursers driving, with destruction dire.

9

Primary

Sprung from the head of Jove [Tritogeneia], of splendid mien, purger of evils, all-victorious queen.

10

Primary

Hear me, O Goddess, when to thee I pray, with supplicating voice both night and day,

11

Primary

And in my latest hour, peace and health, propitious times, and necessary wealth,

12

Primary

And, ever present, be thy vot'ries aid, O, much implor'd, art's parent, blue eyed maid.

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 31.

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.