Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 38 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

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Text

Position

Line 1 of 6

Line Ref	Thomas Taylor \| English
1	Primary The mighty ruler of this earthly ball, for ever flowing, to these rites I call; Permalink
2	Primary Martial and blest, unseen by mortal sight, preventing fears, and pleas'd with gloomy night: Permalink
3	Primary Hence, fancy's terrors are by thee allay'd, all-various king, who lov'st the desart shade: Permalink
4	Primary Each of thy brothers killing, blood is thine, two-fold Curete [Kourete], many-form'd, divine. Permalink
5	Primary By thee transmuted Ceres' [Deo's] body pure, became a dragon's savage and obscure: Permalink
6	Primary Avert thy anger, hear me when I pray, and by fix'd fate, drive fancy's fears away. Permalink

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 38.

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.

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