The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns

Introduction

A book of eighty-eight hymns, and what it was for

This is a liturgy, not an anthology. Eighty-eight short hexameter hymns, seventy-nine of them headed with the name of a god in the bare genitive, and almost all with a line prescribing what to burn — fumigation from frankincense, from storax, from manna, once with poppy — stand in a fixed order behind a forty-four-line Prayer that summons some fifty gods at once — not every god the book hymns (Hekate, Ouranos, Physis, Eros, Tyche, Sleep and Death are among those it passes over), but enough of them that the Prayer reads as a summons to the whole company. The prescriptions are the decisive thing. A reader does not need a note telling him what to burn; a celebrant does. Seventy-eight of the eighty-eight carry one, and the ten that do not are the collection's one standing irregularity — the same ten, every one, whose heading departs from the bare genitive.

The hymns are short because they were spoken over an offering, and monotonous because the monotony is the point: a long chain of epithets, a single imperative near the end, and a petition for the things an association of ordinary people wants — health, peace, a good end to life, a kindly god at a night rite. The collection contains no narrative, no myth told for its own sake, almost no argument. What it contains is names.

Who used it is inferred, not stated. The evidence is internal and it is of two kinds. First, cult offices: Hymn I closes by asking Hekate to be gracious to the βουκόλος, the oxherd — a grade of officer in Bacchic associations, attested in their inscriptions, and the same title returns in the closing line of XXXI, which repeats three of the five words of I.10. Hymn VI.11 ends by directing the rite to the ὀργιοφάνται, those who show the orgia, and the word returns at XXXI.5. The hymns speak repeatedly to μύσται, initiates, and once at IV.9 to a μύστης νεοφάντης, one newly shown. Second, gods who are attested nowhere but western Asia Minor: Mise (XLII), Hipta (XLIX, and at XLVIII.4 beside Tmolos), Meilinoe (LXXI). Attis, Men, Ourania and Adonis, named together in the proem, prove nothing — by the second or third century of our era they were worshipped everywhere — but Mise and Hipta do. Kern proposed Pergamon in 1911; Morand holds that no single city can be fixed, and that the epigraphic evidence comes from across the western coast. The honest statement is the second.

The date is equally inferential: late, probably second or third century of our era, on the vocabulary (λογισμός at LXXVII.5 is a philosopher's word in a hymn), on the absence of any ancient citation of the collection, and on the fact that its Dionysos has already absorbed Sabazios and Bassareus.

What the collection thinks the world is

There is no single Orphic cosmogony, and this book does not hold one. The Rhapsodic theogony begins from Chronos, unaging Time, who generates Chaos and the egg out of which Phanes comes; the version Athenagoras reports begins from water and matter; the Eudemian theogony, and on the usual reconstruction the Derveni papyrus, begin from Night. Hymn III makes Nyx the γένεσις πάντων and belongs with the third; Hymn VI, calling Protogonos twofold and egg-born, presupposes the first. Three hymns separate them, and the collection does not notice.

What it does hold consistently is a way of naming. A god is παντοκράτωρ and πολυώνυμος; the same epithet crosses from one deity to another without embarrassment; and a power and the thing it governs are the same word. Physis (X) and Pan (XI) stand side by side and say almost the same thing twice — Nature as the whole, and Pan as πᾶν — which is a Stoic allegory at least as old as Plato's Cratylus and worked out by Cornutus. Nomos (LXIV) and Dike (LXII) and Dikaiosyne (LXIII) are hymned as gods. So are Tyche (LXXII), the Daimon (LXXIII), Sleep (LXXXV), the Dream (LXXXVI) and Death (LXXXVII). The collection's last stretch is almost entirely made of abstractions given cult.

The most sustained single idea in the book is that a god holds a tiller. Eros alone holds the tiller of all things (LVIII.8); Nomos alone holds the tiller of living things (LXIV.8); Death holds the tiller of all mortals (LXXXVII.1) — and the third, who has the best claim, is the one not given the word alone.

The shape of the book

The order is neither alphabetical nor theogonic, but it is not random. It opens at the crossroads with Hekate and moves outward through the frame of the world — Nyx, Ouranos, Aither, Protogonos, the Stars, Helios, Selene — then to Physis and Pan, the two hymns about the whole; then through the Titan generation to the Olympians; then a long Bacchic centre in which one god is hymned under eight titles; then the powers of judgement and measure; and at the end the powers of the close — the Erinyes and Eumenides, Tyche, the Muses, the Dawn, Themis, the winds, Okeanos, the hearth, and then Sleep, the Dream and Death. Whatever else the arrangement is, it ends where a life ends, and the last hymn but one asks Death to come late and make old age a prize.

The eighty-eighth hymn is not part of that design, and the editor of the text printed here says so. See the Editorial Note.

How much of this text is ancient

Less than a reader expects. The collection survives through a single archetype, which carried the Orphic Argonautica, the Homeric Hymns and Callimachus with it, and which reached Italy in the 1420s. There is no independent ancient transmission and no ancient quotation of the book. Every page of it has therefore been through the hands of editors, and in places what the reader takes for a fact of the hymn is a modern restoration. Four examples, each flagged in the notes where it falls:

— I.1. The manuscripts give a word that is not Greek. Wiel conjectured ἐρεμνήν, dark, which Abel prints and this edition follows; the received text since Gesner reads ἐραννήν, lovely. The collection opens either in darkness or in loveliness, and which is an editor's choice.

— XIV.2. Kybele's lion-drawn chariot — her signature image — is not in the manuscripts at all. It is Hermann's. In the manuscripts Rhea herself draws.