Taylor's Dissertation on the Hymns of Orpheus

Thomas Taylor · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 36 pages

Thomas Taylor's Dissertation on The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus (or Initiations), being Invocations used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, first edition 1787, from pages 276–313 of the Prometheus Trust's revised edition of 2003, with minor corrections and typographical layout by Philaletheians UK. The frontispiece is Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades by Llewllaw. It completes the group of Orpheus files in this section — the hymn to Apollo, the hymn to the Muses, and the legend and works — by treating the hymns as a body rather than one at a time.

The dissertation is arranged as a preface followed by three parts, with the analysis and exegesis running throughout. The preface opens on a general proposition about the history of learning: that there is a revolution in the literary world answering to that in the natural one, the face of things continually changing, and the perfect and perpetual harmony of the universe subsisting by the mutability of its parts. From this Taylor draws the observation the rest depends on — that in consequence of this fluctuation different arts and sciences have flourished at different periods, and that the complete circle of human knowledge has never, he believes, subsisted at once in any nation or age. The argument that follows treats the hymns not as poetry to be admired but as working invocations belonging to a rite, and reads them accordingly: what each divine name signifies within the Platonic scheme Taylor spent his life expounding, how the sequence of hymns corresponds to the order of the divine hierarchy, and what the fumigations prescribed at the head of each are for. The closing pages list further reading and Taylor's other works, of which several are held elsewhere in this library.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.5 MB, 36 pages)