The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns

Key Terms

A dozen words carry more weight in this book than a reader coming to it fresh will expect. This is orientation, not reference; the Glossary at the back is the alphabetical list.

θυμίαμα — fumigation

Not incense. The word names a rite, not a substance: something is burned so that its smoke goes up. Seventy-eight of the eighty-eight hymns prescribe one, and the distribution is the plainest evidence in the book that it was used rather than read. There are thirteen distinct prescriptions. Aromatics (ἀρώματα) in 22 hymns, frankincense in 17, storax in 12, manna in 10, myrrh in 5, frankincense-manna in 4, various substances in 2, and then six that occur once each: torches for Nyx, saffron for Aither, storax and manna for the Erinyes, every seed except beans and aromatics for Gaia, everything except frankincense, and pour a libation of milk for Amphietes, and — for Sleep, and nowhere else — with poppy. Twenty-two, seventeen, twelve, ten, five, four, two and six make seventy-eight. That last is the only rubric in the book whose offering is a prepositional phrase, and the only one that names a drug.

μύστης — initiate

The person the hymns are spoken over. The word and its compounds stand in thirty-seven lines, and the hymns speak to the initiates as a body (VIII.20) and once to one newly shown (IV.9, μύστης νεοφάντης — the lexica cite that very line). The petition is almost always for them, not for the speaker.

τελετή — rite

The ceremony itself. Four hymns claim a founder for it: the Nereids (XXIV.10, first), the Kouretes (XXXVIII.6, first), the Mousai (LXXVI.7, who reveal it without being called first) and Themis (LXXIX.8, first). The collection does not reconcile them.

ὄργια — orgia

Left untranslated. It means the things done and shown at a mystery rite, and every English word for it (orgies, mysteries, secret rites) is either wrong or already taken.

δαίμων — daimon

Left untranslated, in all twenty-nine places — they fall in twenty-eight lines, proem 31 having it twice. Four of the twenty-nine read spirit or divinity until the final run. It is not a demon and not quite a god: a power, sometimes a class of powers (the proem sorts them by region — of heaven, of air, of water, of earth, beneath the earth, and those that walk in fire), sometimes one god addressed as such, and at LXXIII a god in its own right, the Daimon, who brings a house wealth or chills a man's life.

βουκόλος — oxherd

A grade of officer in Bacchic associations, attested in their inscriptions — IPergamon 485 honours an archiboukolos and names some twenty-three βουκόλοι alongside hymn-teachers and Silenoi. Hymn I ends by asking the goddess to be gracious to him, and the last line of XXXI repeats three of its five words (εὐάντητοι for εὐμενέουσαν). This is the single strongest internal sign that the book belonged to a real society of people.

ἁγνός, ἱερός, ὅσιος, εὐίερος, ἅγιος — five words for holy

English has one common word where the hymns have five, and they are not synonyms. This edition renders ἁγνός holy, ἱερός sacred, ὅσιος pure, εὐίερος well-hallowed and ἅγιος consecrated, everywhere and without exception — and καθαρός undefiled, which would otherwise take pure away from ὅσιος. LXXVII.2, where ἱερός and ὅσιος stand in one line, is what forced the distinction. It was forced late, at the thirteenth block of fourteen, and applied backwards over the whole volume only at the final run: forty-seven lines changed, because until then English holy was carrying ἁγνός, ἱερός and ὅσιος at once.

γνώμη and βουλή — purpose and counsel

Both are rendered mind or will in most translations and the difference disappears. Here γνώμη is always purpose — the thing a man lays up in his breast (LXXVII.7), what the gods put into a sleeper (LXXXVI.5) — and βουλή always counsel; until the final run one line of each read designs, and the distinction collapsed at exactly the two places it was made for, which occurs chiefly in the collection's commonest closing formula, εὔφρονι βουλῇ, with kindly counsel, at XIV.12, LIX.20, LXX.1, LXXIV.9 and LXXIX.11.

ἀνάγκη — necessity

Not fate and not compulsion by a person: the constraint the world is under. The Moirai are hymned as the powers who see it (LIX), the Eumenides are set over it (LXX.5), and the Dream is asked to show it or to withhold it (LXXXVI.13).

πρόνοια — providence

A power in the proem's catalogue, and the only abstraction there set over the others (ἐπὶ τοῖσι, 30). Later Platonism makes a great deal of the word; the collection simply invokes it.

αἰών and χρόνος — unending time, and time

Distinguished in the proem (28–29) and not always afterwards. Aion is duration as a power; Chronos in the Rhapsodic theogony is the first principle. Herakles is identified with Chronos at XII.3, father of time, which is the collection's one flash of theogonic doctrine in an otherwise conventional hymn.

φύσις — nature

The thirty-line Hymn X is the longest in the book after the proem and is addressed to her as a goddess: all-mother, all-ruler, ever-flowing, self-sufficient. Hymn XI then says the same of Pan. Whether the juxtaposition is a doctrine or an accident of arrangement is not decidable from the text.

παννυχίς — the all-night rite

Named by its adjective at III.5, of Nyx, and again of Aphrodite at LV.2; and the Bacchic nights of LXXIX.9 are the same thing. It is what the book was for.