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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 35

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 35 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 12

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear me, Jove's [Zeus'] daughter, celebrated queen, Bacchian [Bromia] and Titan, of a noble mien:

2

Primary

In darts rejoicing and on all to shine, torch-bearing Goddess, Dictynna divine;

3

Primary

O'er births presiding, and thyself a maid, to labour-pangs imparting ready aid:

4

Primary

Dissolver of the zone and wrinkl'd care, fierce huntress, glorying in the Sylvan war:

5

Primary

Swift in the course, in dreadful arrows skill'd, wandering by night, rejoicing in the field:

6

Primary

Of manly form, erect, of bounteous mind, illustrious daemon, nurse of human kind:

7

Primary

Immortal, earthly, bane of monsters fell, 'tis thine; blest maid, on woody hills to dwell:

8

Primary

Foe of the stag, whom woods and dogs delight, in endless youth who flourish fair and bright.

9

Primary

O, universal queen, august, divine, a various form, Cydonian pow'r, is thine:

10

Primary

Dread guardian Goddess, with benignant mind auspicious, come to mystic rites inclin'd

11

Primary

Give earth a store of beauteous fruits to bear, send gentle Peace, and Health with lovely hair,

12

Primary

And to the mountains drive Disease and Care.

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 35.

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.