Muses' Whisper

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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 57

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 57 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

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Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

I Call great Cupid [Eros], source of sweet delight, holy and pure, and lovely to the sight;

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2

Primary

Darting, and wing'd, impetuous fierce desire, with Gods and mortals playing, wand'ring fire:

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3

Primary

Cautious, and two-fold, keeper of the keys of heav'n and earth, the air, and spreading seas;

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4

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Of all that Ceres' [Deo's] fertile realms contains, by which th' all-parent Goddess life sustains,

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5

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Or dismal Tartarus is doom'd to keep, widely extended, or the sounding, deep;

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6

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For thee, all Nature's various realms obey, who rul'st alone, with universal sway.

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7

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Come, blessed pow'r, regard these mystic fires, and far avert, unlawful mad desires.

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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 57.

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.

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Primary source: English aggregate translations | Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi.