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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 8

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 8 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hear, Goddess queen, diffusing silver light, bull-horn'd and wand'ring thro' the gloom of Night.

2

Primary

With stars surrounded, and with circuit wide Night's torch extending, thro' the heav'ns you ride:

3

Primary

Female and Male with borrow'd rays you shine, and now full-orb'd, now tending to decline.

4

Primary

Mother of ages, fruit-producing Moon [Mene], whose amber orb makes Night's reflected noon:

5

Primary

Lover of horses, splendid, queen of Night, all-seeing pow'r bedeck'd with starry light.

6

Primary

Lover of vigilance, the foe of strife, in peace rejoicing, and a prudent life:

7

Primary

Fair lamp of Night, its ornament and friend, who giv'st to Nature's works their destin'd end.

8

Primary

Queen of the stars, all-wife Diana hail! Deck'd with a graceful robe and shining veil;

9

Primary

Come, blessed Goddess, prudent, starry, bright, come moony-lamp with chaste and splendid light,

10

Primary

Shine on these sacred rites with prosp'rous rays, and pleas'd accept thy suppliant's mystic praise.

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 8.

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.