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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 5

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 5 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Mighty first-begotten [Protogonos], hear my pray'r, two-fold, egg-born, and wand'ring thro' the air,

2

Primary

Bull-roarer, glorying in thy golden wings, from whom the race of Gods and mortals springs.

3

Primary

Ericapaeus [Erikapaios], celebrated pow'r, ineffable, occult, all shining flow'r.

4

Primary

From eyes obscure thou wip'st the gloom of night, all-spreading splendour, pure and holy light

5

Primary

Hence Phanes call'd, the glory of the sky, on waving pinions thro' the world you fly.

6

Primary

Priapus, dark-ey'd splendour, thee I sing, genial, all-prudent, ever-blessed king,

7

Primary

With joyful aspect on our rights divine and holy sacrifice propitious shine.

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 5.

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.