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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 84

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 84 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 7

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Sleep [Hypnos], king of Gods, and men of mortal birth, sov'reign of all sustain'd by mother Earth;

2

Primary

For thy dominion is supreme alone, o'er all extended, and by all things known.

3

Primary

'Tis thine all bodies with benignant mind in other bands than those of brass to bind:

4

Primary

Tamer of cares, to weary toil repose, from whom sweet solace in affliction flows.

5

Primary

Thy pleasing, gentle chains preserve the soul, and e'en the dreadful cares of death controul;

6

Primary

For Death [Thanatos] and Lethe with oblivious stream, mankind thy genuine brothers justly deem.

7

Primary

With fav'ring aspect to my pray'r incline, and save thy mystics in their works 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 84.

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.