Orpheus' Hymn to Apollo

Unknown · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 11 pages

The Orphic hymn to Apollo, given with the Greek and Thomas Taylor's verse translation of 1792 in facing columns, Taylor's own annotation retained, and further commentary supplied by the compiler. The hymn's heading names its offering — to Apollo, fumigation from manna — and a note glosses manna as Theosophia, the divine bread of wisdom.

Taylor's rendering addresses the god through the accumulated titles of the hymn: blest Pæan, slayer of Tityus, the Lycorian Phœbus whom Memphian tribes revere, golden-lyred and spermatic, from whom the field receives its constant fertility; Titanic, Grunian and Smynthian, Python-destroying and Delphian, rural and light-bearing, leader of the Muses, far-darting and armed with dread arrows. The second movement calls on the Delian king whose light-producing eye views all beneath the sky, whose locks are gold and whose oracles are sure, and asks him to hear an entreaty made for the whole human kind. The commentary that follows takes up the two objects named in the offering. Manna is read as the divine bread of wisdom; the white stone is identified as the sign of initiation named in the Revelation of St John, engraved with the word prize and given to the neophyte who had passed through all the trials of the Mysteries — the potent white cornelian of the mediæval Rosicrucians, who took it from the Gnostics. The verse from Revelation about the hidden manna and the new name written in the stone is quoted and glossed accordingly, and a passage from the Commentaries is set beside it on fruits and grain unknown to earth being brought by the Lords of Wisdom, with the observation that wheat has never been found in the wild state.

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