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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 72

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 72 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Thee, mighty-ruling, Daemon dread, I call, mild Jove [Zeus], life-giving, and the source of all:

2

Primary

Great Jove [Zeus], much-wand'ring, terrible and strong, to whom revenge and tortures dire belong.

3

Primary

Mankind from thee, in plenteous wealth abound, when in their dwellings joyful thou art found;

4

Primary

Or pass thro' life afflicted and distress'd, the needful means of bliss by thee supprest.

5

Primary

'Tis thine alone endu'd with boundless might, to keep the keys of sorrow and delight.

6

Primary

O holy, blessed father, hear my pray'r, disperse the seeds of life-consuming care;

7

Primary

With fav'ring mind the sacred rites attend, and grant my days a glorious, blessed end.

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 72.

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.