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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 7

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 7 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 15

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear golden Titan, whose eternal eye with broad survey, illumines all the sky.

2

Primary

Self-born, unwearied in diffusing light, and to all eyes the mirrour of delight:

3

Primary

Lord of the seasons, with thy fiery car and leaping coursers, beaming light from far:

4

Primary

With thy right hand the source of morning light, and with thy left the father of the night.

5

Primary

Agile and vig'rous, venerable Sun, fiery and bright around the heav'ns you run.

6

Primary

Foe to the wicked, but the good man's guide, o'er all his steps propitious you preside:

7

Primary

With various founding, golden lyre, 'tis mine to fill the world with harmony divine.

8

Primary

Father of ages, guide of prosp'rous deeds, the world's commander, borne by lucid steeds,

9

Primary

Immortal Jove [Zeus], all-searching, bearing light, source of existence, pure and fiery bright

10

Primary

Bearer of fruit, almighty lord of years, agil and warm, whom ev'ry pow'r reveres.

11

Primary

Great eye of Nature and the starry skies, doom'd with immortal flames to set and rise

12

Primary

Dispensing justice, lover of the stream, the world's great despot, and o'er all supreme.

13

Primary

Faithful defender, and the eye of right, of steeds the ruler, and of life the light:

14

Primary

With founding whip four fiery steeds you guide, when in the car of day you glorious ride.

15

Primary

Propitious on these mystic labours shine, and bless thy suppliants with a life divine.

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 7.

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.