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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 63

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 63 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 11

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

The holy king of Gods and men I call, celestial Law [Nomos], the righteous seal of all;

2

Primary

The seal which stamps whate'er the earth contains, Nature's firm basis, and the liquid plains:

3

Primary

Stable, and starry, of harmonious frame, preserving laws eternally the same:

4

Primary

Thy all-composing pow'r in heaven appears, connects its frame, and props the starry spheres;

5

Primary

And shakes weak Envy with tremendous sound, toss'd by thy arm in giddy whirls around.

6

Primary

'Tis thine, the life of mortals to defend, and crown existence with a blessed end;

7

Primary

For thy command and alone, of all that lives order and rule to ev'ry dwelling gives:

8

Primary

Ever observant of the upright mind, and of just actions the companion kind;

9

Primary

Foe to the lawless, with avenging ire, their steps involving in destruction dire.

10

Primary

Come, bless, abundant pow'r, whom all revere, by all desir'd, with favr'ing mind draw near;

11

Primary

Give me thro' life, on thee to fix my fight, and ne'er forsake the equal paths of right.

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 63.

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.