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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 82

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 82 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 6

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Ocean I call, whose nature ever flows, from whom at first both Gods and men arose;

2

Primary

Sire incorruptible, whose waves surround, and earth's concluding mighty circle bound:

3

Primary

Hence every river, hence the spreading sea, and earth's pure bubbling fountains spring from thee:

4

Primary

Hear, mighty fire, for boundless bliss is thine, whose waters purify the pow'rs divine:

5

Primary

Earth's friendly limit, fountain of the pole, whose waves wide spreading and circumfluent roll.

6

Primary

Approach benevolent, with placid mind, and be for ever to thy mystics kind.

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 82.

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.