Reader

Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 68

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 68 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 12

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Vociferous Bacchanalian Furies [Erinyes], hear! Ye, I invoke, dread pow'rs, whom all revere;

2

Primary

Nightly, profound, in secret who retire, Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megara dire:

3

Primary

Deep in a cavern merg'd, involv'd in night, near where Styx flows impervious to the sight;

4

Primary

Ever attendant on mysterious rites, furious and fierce, whom Fate's dread law delights;

5

Primary

Revenge and sorrows dire to you belong, hid in a savage veil, severe and strong,

6

Primary

Terrific virgins, who forever dwell endu'd with various forms, in deepest hell;

7

Primary

Aerial, and unseen by human kind, and swiftly coursing, rapid as the mind.

8

Primary

In vain the Sun with wing'd refulgence bright, in vain the Moon, far darting milder light,

9

Primary

Wisdom and Virtue may attempt in vain; and pleasing, Art, our transport to obtain

10

Primary

Unless with these you readily conspire, and far avert your all-destructive ire.

11

Primary

The boundless tribes of mortals you descry, and justly rule with Right's [Dike's] impartial eye.

12

Primary

Come, snaky-hair'd, Fates [Moirai] many-form'd, divine, suppress your rage, and to our rites incline.

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 68.

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.