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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 42

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 42 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Daughters of Jove [Zeus] and Themis, seasons bright,

2

Primary

Justice [Dike], and blessed Peace [Eirene], and lawful Right [Eunomia],

3

Primary

Vernal and grassy, vivid, holy pow'rs, whose balmy breath exhales in lovely flow'rs

4

Primary

All-colour'd seasons, rich increase your care, circling, for ever flourishing and fair:

5

Primary

Invested with a veil of shining dew, a flow'ry veil delightful to the view:

6

Primary

Attending Proserpine [Persephone], when back from night,

7

Primary

the Fates [Moirai] and Graces [Kharites] Lead her up to light;

8

Primary

When in a band-harmonious they advance, and joyful round her, form the solemn dance:

9

Primary

With Ceres [Meter] triumphing, and Jove [Zeus] divine; propitious come, and on our incense shine;

10

Primary

Give earth a blameless store of fruits to bear, and make a novel mystic's life your 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 42.

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.