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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 60

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 60 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Thee, Nemesis I call, almighty queen, by whom the deeds of mortal life are seen:

2

Primary

Eternal, much rever'd, of boundless sight, alone rejoicing in the just and right:

3

Primary

Changing the counsels of the human breast for ever various, rolling without rest.

4

Primary

To every mortal is thy influence known, and men beneath thy righteous bondage groan;

5

Primary

For ev'ry thought within the mind conceal'd is to thy fight perspicuously reveal'd.

6

Primary

The soul unwilling reason to obey by lawless passion rul'd, thy eyes survey.

7

Primary

All to see, hear, and rule, O pow'r divine whose nature Equity contains, is thine.

8

Primary

Come, blessed, holy Goddess, hear my pray'r, and make thy mystic's life, thy constant care:

9

Primary

Give aid benignant in the needful hour, and strength abundant to the reas'ning pow'r;

10

Primary

And far avert the dire, unfriendly race of counsels impious, arrogant, and base.

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 60.

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.