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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 53

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 53 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Great nurse of Bacchus [Bakkhos], to my pray'r incline, Silenus, honor'd by the pow'rs divine

2

Primary

And by mankind at the triennial feast illustrious daemon, reverenc'd as the best:

3

Primary

Holy, august, the source of lawful rites, rejoicing pow'r, whom vigilance delights

4

Primary

With Sylvans dancing ever young and fair,

5

Primary

head of the Bacchic Nymphs [Naiades and Bakkhai], who ivy bear.

6

Primary

With all thy Satyrs on our incense shine, Daemons wild form'd, and bless the rites divine;

7

Primary

Come, rouse to sacred Joy thy pupil kin, and Brumal Nymphs with rites Lenaean bring;

8

Primary

Our orgies shining thro' the night inspire, and bless triumphant pow'r the sacred choir.

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 53.

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.