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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 6

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 6 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

With holy voice I call the stars [Astron] on high, pure sacred lights and genii of the sky.

2

Primary

Celestial stars, the progeny of Night [Nyx], in whirling circles beaming far your light,

3

Primary

Refulgent rays around the heav'ns ye throw, eternal fires, the source of all below.

4

Primary

With flames significant of Fate ye shine, and aptly rule for men a path divine.

5

Primary

In seven bright zones ye run with wand'ring flames, and heaven and earth compose your lucid frames:

6

Primary

With course unwearied, pure and fiery bright forever shining thro' the veil of Night.

7

Primary

Hail twinkling, joyful, ever wakeful fires! Propitious shine on all my just desires;

8

Primary

These sacred rites regard with conscious rays, and end our works devoted to your praise.

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 6.

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.