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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 77

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 77 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 9

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear me, O Goddess! whose emerging ray leads on the broad refulgence of the day;

2

Primary

Blushing Aurora [Eos], whose celestial light beams on the world with red'ning splendours bright:

3

Primary

Angel of Titan, whom with constant round, thy orient beams recall from night profound:

4

Primary

Labour of ev'ry kind to lead is thine, of mortal life the minister divine.

5

Primary

Mankind in thee eternally delight, and none presumes to shun thy beauteous sight.

6

Primary

Soon as thy splendours break the bands of rest, and eyes unclose with pleasing sleep oppress'd;

7

Primary

Men, reptiles, birds, and beasts, with gen'ral voice, and all the nations of the deep, rejoice;

8

Primary

For all the culture of our life is thine. Come, blessed pow'r! and to these rites incline:

9

Primary

Thy holy light increase, and unconfin'd diffuse its radiance on thy mystic's mind.

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 77.

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.