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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 73

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 73 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

I Call Leucothea, of great Cadmus born, and Bacchus' [Dionysos'] nurse, whom ivy leaves adorn.

2

Primary

Hear, pow'rful Goddess, in the mighty deep wide and profound, thy Ration doom'd to keep:

3

Primary

In waves rejoicing, guardian of mankind; for ships from thee alone deliv'rance find

4

Primary

Amidst the fury of th' unstable main, when art no more avail, and strength is vain;

5

Primary

When rushing billows with tempestuous ire o'erwhelm the mariner in ruin dire,

6

Primary

Thou hear'st, with pity touch'd, his suppliant pray'r, resolv'd his life to succour and to spare.

7

Primary

Be ever present, Goddess! in distress, waft ships along with prosperous success:

8

Primary

Thy mystics thro' the stormy sea defend, and safe conduct them to their destin'd 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 73.

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.