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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 51

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 51 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 11

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Bacchus fanatic, much-nam'd, blest, divine, bull-fac'd Lenaean, bearer of the vine;

2

Primary

From fire descended, raging, Nysian king, from whom initial ceremonies spring:

3

Primary

Liknitan Bacchus, pure and fiery bright, prudent [Eubouleos], crown-bearer, wandering in the night;

4

Primary

Pupil of Proserpine, mysterious pow'r, triple, ineffable, Jove's [Zeus'] secret flow'r:

5

Primary

Ericapaeus, first-begotten nam'd, of Gods the father, and the offspring fam'd:

6

Primary

Bearing a sceptre, leader of the choir, whose dancing feet, fanatic Furies fire,

7

Primary

When the triennial band thou dost inspire.

8

Primary

Loud-sounding, Tages, of a fiery light, born of two mothers, Amphietus bright:

9

Primary

Wand'ring on mountains, cloth'd with skins of deer, Apollo, golden-ray'd, whom all revere.

10

Primary

God of the grape with leaves of ivy crown'd, Bassarian, lovely, virgin-like, renown'd

11

Primary

Come blessed pow'r, regard thy mystics voice, propitious come, and in these rites rejoice.

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 51.

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.