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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 67

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 67 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Much-desir'd, prolific, gen'ral queen, hear me, life-bearing, Health [Hygeia], of beauteous mien,

2

Primary

Mother of all; by thee diseases dire, of bliss destructive, from our life retire;

3

Primary

And ev'ry house is flourishing and fair, if with rejoicing aspect thou art there:

4

Primary

Each daedal art, thy vig'rous force inspires, and all the world thy helping hand desires;

5

Primary

Pluto life's bane alone resists thy will, and ever hates thy all-preserving skill.

6

Primary

O fertile queen, from thee forever flows to mortal life from agony repose;

7

Primary

And men without thy all-sustaining ease, find nothing useful, nothing form'd to please;

8

Primary

Without thy aid, not Plutus' [Aides'] self can thrive, nor man to much afflicted age arrive;

9

Primary

For thou alone of countenance serene, dost govern all things, universal queen.

10

Primary

Assist thy mystics with propitious mind, and far avert disease of ev'ry kind.

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 67.

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.