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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 70

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 70 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 9

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Call Melinoe, saffron-veil'd, terrene, who from infernal Pluto's sacred queen [Phersephone],

2

Primary

Mixt with Saturnian Jupiter [Kronion Zeus], arose, near where Cocytus' mournful river flows;

3

Primary

When under Pluto's [Plouton's] semblance,

4

Primary

Jove [Zeus] divine deceiv'd with guileful arts dark Proserpine [Phersephone].

5

Primary

Hence, partly black thy limbs and partly white, from Pluto [Plouton] dark, from Jove [Zeus] etherial, bright

6

Primary

Thy colour'd members, men by night inspire when seen in specter'd forms with terrors dire;

7

Primary

Now darkly visible, involv'd in night, perspicuous now they meet the fearful fight.

8

Primary

Terrestrial queen expel wherever found the soul's mad fears to earth's remotest bound;

9

Primary

With holy aspect on our incense shrine, and bless thy mystics, and the rites divine.

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 70.

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.