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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 39

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 39 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 13

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Universal mother, Ceres [Deo] fam'd august, the source of wealth, and various nam'd:

2

Primary

Great nurse, all-bounteous, blessed and divine, who joy'st in peace, to nourish corn is thine:

3

Primary

Goddess of seed, of fruits abundant, fair, harvest and threshing, are thy constant care;

4

Primary

Who dwell'st in Eleusina's seats retir'd, lovely, delightful queen, by all desir'd.

5

Primary

Nurse of all mortals, whose benignant mind, first ploughing oxen to the yoke confin'd;

6

Primary

And gave to men, what nature's wants require, with plenteous means of bliss which all desire.

7

Primary

In verdure flourishing in honor bright, assessor of great Bacchus [Bromios], bearing light:

8

Primary

Rejoicing in the reapers sickles, kind, whose nature lucid, earthly, pure, we find.

9

Primary

Prolific, venerable, Nurse divine, thy daughter loving, holy Proserpine [Koure]:

10

Primary

A car with dragons yok'd, 'tis thine to guide, and orgies singing round thy throne to ride:

11

Primary

Only-begotten, much-producing queen, all flowers are thine and fruits of lovely green.

12

Primary

Bright Goddess, come, with Summer's rich increase swelling and pregnant, leading smiling Peace;

13

Primary

Come, with fair Concord and imperial Health, and join with these a needful store of wealth.

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 39.

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.