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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 55

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 55 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 9

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Much-nam'd, and best of daemons, hear my pray'r, the desart-loving, deck'd with tender hair;

2

Primary

Joy to diffuse, by all desir'd is thine, much form'd, Eubulus [Eubouleos]; aliment divine

3

Primary

Female and Male, all charming to the sight, Adonis ever flourishing and bright;

4

Primary

At stated periods doom'd to set and rise, with splendid lamp, the glory of the skies.

5

Primary

Two-horn'd and lovely, reverenc'd with tears, of beauteous form, adorn'd with copious hairs.

6

Primary

Rejoicing in the chace, all-graceful pow'r, sweet plant of Venus [Aphrodite], Love's [Eors'] delightful flow'r:

7

Primary

Descended from the secret bed divine, of lovely-hair'd, infernal Proserpine [Persephone].

8

Primary

'Tis thine to fink in Tartarus profound, and shine again thro' heav'ns illustrious round,

9

Primary

With beauteous temp'ral orb restor'd to sight; come, with earth's fruits, and in these flames delight.

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 55.

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.