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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 43

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 43 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Cadmean Goddess, universal queen, thee, Semele I call, of beauteous mien;

2

Primary

Deep-bosom'd, lovely flowing locks are thine, mother of Bacchus [Dionysos], joyful and divine,

3

Primary

The mighty offspring, whom love's thunder bright, forc'd immature, and fright'ned into light:

4

Primary

Born from the deathless counsels, secret, high, of Jove Saturnian [Zeus Kronion], regent of the sky

5

Primary

Whom Proserpine [Persephone] permits to view the light, and visit mortals from the realms of night:

6

Primary

Constant attending on the sacred rites, and feast triennial, which thy soul delights;

7

Primary

When thy son's wond'rous birth mankind relate, and secrets deep, and holy celebrate.

8

Primary

Now I invoke thee, great Cadmean queen, to bless these rites with countenance serene.

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 43.

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.