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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 78

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 78 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Illustrious Themis, of celestial birth, thee I invoke, young blossom of the earth;

2

Primary

Beauteous-eyed virgin; first from thee alone, prophetic oracles to men were known,

3

Primary

Giv'n from the deep recesses of the fane in sacred Pytho, where renown'd you reign;

4

Primary

From thee, Apollo's oracles arose, and from thy pow'r his inspiration flows.

5

Primary

Honour'd by all, of form divinely bright, majestic virgin, wand'ring in the night:

6

Primary

Mankind from thee first learnt initial rites, and Bacchus' nightly choirs thy soul delights;

7

Primary

For holy honours to disclose is thine, with all the culture of the pow'rs divine.

8

Primary

Be present, Goddess, to my pray'r inclin'd, and bless the mystic rites with fav'ring 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 78.

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.