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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 56

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 56 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 9

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hermes I call, whom Fate decrees to dwell in the dire path which leads to deepest hell

2

Primary

O Bacchic [Bakkheios] Hermes, progeny divine of Dionysius [Dionysos], parent of the vine,

3

Primary

And of celestial Venus [Aphrodite] Paphian queen, dark eye-lash'd Goddess of a lovely mien:

4

Primary

Who constant wand'rest thro' the sacred feats

5

Primary

where hell's dread empress, Proserpine [Persephone], retreats;

6

Primary

To wretched souls the leader of thc way when Fate decrees, to regions void of day:

7

Primary

Thine is the wand which causes sleep to fly, or lulls to slumb'rous rest the weary eye;

8

Primary

For Proserpine [Persephone's] thro' Tart'rus dark and wide gave thee forever flowing souls to guide.

9

Primary

Come, blessed pow'r the sacrifice attend, and grant our mystic works a happy end.

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 56.

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.