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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 41

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 41 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Call Thesmophorus, spermatic God [Dionysos], of various names, who bears the leafy rod:

2

Primary

Mises [Misa], ineffable, pure, sacred queen, two-fold Iacchus, male and female seen:

3

Primary

Illustr'ous, whether to rejoice is thine in incense offer'd, in the fane divine;

4

Primary

Or if in Phrygia most thy soul delights, performing with thy mother sacred rites;

5

Primary

Or if the land of Cyprus is thy care, well pleas'd to dwell with Cytherea [Kythereia] fair;

6

Primary

Or if exulting in the fertile plains with thy dark mother Isis, where she reigns,

7

Primary

With nurses pure attended, near the flood of sacred Egypt, thy divine abode:

8

Primary

Wherever resident, blest pow'r attend, and with benignant mind these labours end.

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 41.

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.