Orpheus' Hymn to Earth

Orpheus, Thomas Taylor (T) · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying Hymn XXV from The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, described on its own title page as invocations used in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in Thomas Taylor's 1824 verse translation. The ritual direction is printed above the hymn as part of the text — fumigation from every kind of seed, except beans and aromatics — with the Greek given in a footnote.

The hymn addresses Earth as the source of gods and men alike, endued with a force that is at once fertile and all-destroying. What follows is mostly a piling-up of epithets for productiveness: all-parent, whose prolific powers produce a store of beauteous fruits and flowers; the eternal world's strong base, immortal and blessed; from whose wide womb, as from an endless root, many-formed fruits shoot up mature and grateful; deep-bosomed, pleased with grassy plains, sweet to the smell and with prolific rains. The scale then widens in the middle of the poem, where Earth is called an all-flowery dæmon and the centre of the world, around whose orb the beauteous stars are hurled with rapid whirl, eternal and divine. The closing lines are the petition the hymn exists for — that the goddess listen, make the increase of fruits her constant care, draw near with the fertile Seasons in her train, and hear her suppliant with a propitious mind. Taylor's own note explains the theology behind the address: Earth is the mother of everything of which Heaven is the father, and in the Orphic system Rhea, Earth and Vesta are one and the same divinity considered under her different essential characters.

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