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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 75

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 75 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 12

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Daughters of Jove [Zeus and Mnemosyne], dire-sounding and divine,

2

Primary

renown'd Pierian, sweetly speaking Nine;

3

Primary

To those whose breasts your sacred furies fire much-form'd, the objects of supreme desire:

4

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Sources of blameless virtue to mankind, who form to excellence the youthful mind;

5

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Who nurse the soul, and give her to descry the paths of right with Reason's steady eye.

6

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Commanding queens who lead to sacred light the intellect refin'd from Error's night;

7

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And to mankind each holy rite disclose, for mystic knowledge from your nature flows.

8

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Clio, and Erato, who charms the sight, with thee Euterpe minist'ring delight:

9

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Thalia flourishing, Polymina fam'd, Melpomene from skill in music nam'd:

10

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Terpischore, Urania heav'nly bright, with thee who gav'st me to behold the light.

11

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Come, venerable, various, pow'rs divine, with fav'ring aspect on your mystics shine;

12

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Bring glorious, ardent, lovely, fam'd desire, and warm my bosom with your sacred fire.

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 75.

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.