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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 3

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 3 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Great Heav'n [Ouranos], whose mighty frame no respite knows, father of all, from whom the world arose:

2

Primary

Hear, bounteous parent, source and end of all, forever whirling round this earthly ball;

3

Primary

Abode of Gods, whose guardian pow'r surrounds th' eternal World with ever during bounds;

4

Primary

Whose ample bosom and encircling folds the dire necessity of nature holds.

5

Primary

Aetherial, earthly, whose all-various frame azure and full of forms, no power can tame.

6

Primary

All-seeing Heav'n, progenitor of Time [Kronos], forever blessed, deity sublime,

7

Primary

Propitious on a novel mystic shine, and crown his wishes with a life divine.

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 3.

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.