Reader

Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 52

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 52 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Terrestrial Dionysius [Dionysos Khthonios], hear my pray'r, awak'ned rise with nymphs of lovely hair:

2

Primary

Great Amphietus Bacchus, annual God, who laid asleep in Proserpine's [Persephone's] abode,

3

Primary

Did'st lull to drowsy and oblivious rest, the rites triennial, and the sacred feast;

4

Primary

Which rous'd again by thee, in graceful ring, thy nurses round thee mystic anthems sing;

5

Primary

When briskly dancing with rejoicing pow'rs, thou mov'st in concert with the circling hours.

6

Primary

Come, blessed, fruitful, horned, and divine, and on these rites with joyful aspect shine;

7

Primary

Accept the general incense and the pray'r, and make prolific holy fruits thy 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 52.

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.