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THE ORPHIC HYMNS
The Orphic Hymns
TRANSLATION, INTRODUCTION, AND NOTES BY
Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow
© 2013 Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow
All rights reserved. Published 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orphic hymns. English.
The Orphic hymns / translation, introduction, and notes by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow.
pages. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-0881-1 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0882-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0886-6 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-0881-3 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-0882-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-0886-4 (electronic)
1. Orphic hymns. I. Athanassakis, Apostolos N. II. Wolkow, Benjamin M. III. Title.
PA4259.E5 2013
292.3′8—dc23 2012027077
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CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
THE ORPHIC HYMNS
Orpheus to Mousaios
1. To Hekate
2. To Prothyraia
3. To Night
4. To Sky
5. To Ether
6. To Protogonos
7. To the Stars
8. To the Sun
9. To Selene
10. To Physis
11. To Pan
12. To Herakles
13. To Kronos
14. To Rhea
15. To Zeus
16. To Hera
17. To Poseidon
18. To Plouton
19. To Zeus the Thunderbolt
20. To Astrapaios Zeus
21. To the Clouds
22. To the Sea
23. To Nereus
24. To the Nereids
25. To Proteus
26. To Earth
27. To the Mother of the Gods
28. To Hermes
29. Hymn to Persephone
30. To Dionysos
31. Hymn to the Kouretes
32. To Athene
33. To Nike
34. To Apollon
35. To Leto
36. To Artemis
37. To the Titans
38. To the Kouretes
39. To Korybas
40 To Eleusinian Demeter
41. To Mother Antaia
42. To Mise
43. To the Seasons
44 To Semele
45. Hymn to Dionysos Bassareus and Triennial
46. To Liknites
47. To Perikionios
48. To Sabazios
49. To Hipta
50. To Lysios Lenaios
51. To the Nymphs
52. To the God of Triennial Feasts
53. To the God of Annual Feasts
54. To Silenos Satyros and the Bacchae
55. To Aphrodite
56. To Adonis
57. To Chthonic Hermes
58. To Eros
59. To the Fates
60. To the Graces
61. Hymn to Nemesis
62. To Dike
63. To Justice
64. Hymn to Nomos
65. To Ares
66. To Hephaistos
67. To Asklepios
68. To Hygeia
69. To the Erinyes
70. To the Eumenides
71. To Melinoe
72. To Tyche
73. To Daimon
74. To Leukothea
75. To Palaimon
76. To the Muses
77. To Mnemosyne
78. To Dawn
79. To Themis
80. To Boreas
81. To Zephyros
82. To Notos
83. To Okeanos
84. To Hestia
85. To Sleep
86. To Dream
87. To Death
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index Nominum
Index Locorum
PREFACE
IN 1977, Scholars Press (Atlanta, Georgia) published the first edition of Orphic Hymns: Text, Translation and Notes by Apostolos N. Athanassakis for the Society of Biblical Literature’s Texts and Translations, Graeco-Roman Religion Series. The text used for that edition, as for the present one, is that by Wilhelm Quandt. Occasionally Gabriella Ricciardelli’s more recent text was also consulted for the present edition. The translation from the first edition has been revisited and rejuvenated. In all cases which involve change the purpose has been to attain a greater flow, especially such as is appropriate to a sacred text consisting of lengthy lists of epithets. The introduction is more comprehensive and the notes offer the reader much more information. It is hoped that the indices will be a welcome addition.
Professor Athanassakis wishes to express his warmest thanks to Miss Allison Emily Page for her patient assistance in the preparation of substantial portions of the book. He has over the years received a great deal of inspiration from the works of Juha Pentikäinen, who introduced him to the study of the Kalevala as well as of bear rituals among the Sami people of the subarctic expanses.
Dr. Wolkow would like to thank the Classics departments at Duke University, Loyola University Chicago, and the University of Georgia at Athens, and in particular Diskin Clay, Erika Hermanowicz, and Charles Platter. Parts of the introduction and of the notes to hymn 34 were originally presented at a talk he delivered at the University of Georgia entitled “Play It Again, Sun: Cosmic Music and the Orphic Hymns,” and he is grateful for the warm reception and incisive feedback from the participants that day. He further wishes to acknowledge the influence of former professors Borimir Jordan, Robert Renehan, and, of course, Apostolos Athanassakis, who graciously invited him to take part in the revision of the original edition of the Hymns. Finally, he dedicates his contributions to the present volume to his mythology students, both past and future.
The authors are very appreciative of the Johns Hopkins University Press, above all our former and current editors, Michael Lonegro and Matthew McAdam, respectively, for their many indulgences as the project began to take on a life of its own. Professor Louis Karchin, Professor of Music at New York University, has put a few of the hymns to music. Dancers of classical ballet, persons interested in spirituality, and students from as far as China have expressed further interest in the Orphic Hymns. All this has helped us sustain our enthusiasm for this rare poetic composition of late antiquity.
INTRODUCTION
ANTIQITY is virtually silent on the Orphic Hymns. The oldest reference to them is found in a scholium on Hesiod’s Theogony by Ioannes Galenos (first half of the twelfth century AD). Galenos refers to them three times in the same scholium but says nothing about their authorship or literary value.
The first manuscript of the Hymns to reach the West was the one carried to Venice by Giovanni Aurispa in 1423. It seems that another manuscript was taken to Italy by Franciscus Philadelphus four years later in 1427. Both of these manuscripts, and perhaps four others, have b
een lost. The loss of the manuscript brought to Venice by Aurispa is especially regrettable since it may have served as the archetype of all surviving codices. Of these we have thirty-six, twenty-five on paper and eleven on skin. Some of these codices contain only a portion of the Hymns. The same codices frequently contain the Homeric hymns, Hesiodea, the Orphic Argonautika, and the hymns of Proclus and Kallimakhos. As for the date of these codices, it seems safe to infer that they were all copied between 1450 and 1550.
We have reason to believe that the codex Aurispa brought with him from Constantinople in 1423 stirred up considerable excitement among the learned. On the other hand, it may not have been until the arrival in Venice of the Greek sage Georgios Gemistos (usually surnamed Plethon) sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century that the Italians really took notice of the Orphic Hymns. The editio princeps was printed in Florence in 1500. It also contains the Orphic Argonautica and some of the hymns of Proclus. By the year 1600 there were five more editions, one of which was Aldine’s, published in 1517. From the editions that followed in subsequent centuries the one that excels all others—perhaps to this day—is Gottfried Hermann’s 1805 work. Abel’s edition in 1885 has been received with adverse criticism. Wilhelm Quandt had finished his edition by 1941, but the vicissitudes of the war forced most scholars to wait until 1955 to reap the benefits of his labors from its reprinted and somewhat augmented version.
A date of composition cannot be assigned to the Hymns with any certainty. A few ancient sources make direct or oblique references to Orphic hymns, but they need not refer to our Hymns. It is much more reasonable to assume that the expression “Hymns of Orpheus” (e.g., Plato Laws 829d–e, Pausanias 9.30.12) does not refer to a specific collection such as the one at our disposal but rather to Orphic poetry—perhaps even of the oral variety—that was attributed to the founder of Orphism. In the first oration against Aristogeiton, Pseudo-Demosthenes tells us that “Orpheus says that she [Dike] sits beside the throne of Zeus and watches over all human matters” (25.11). The similarity between this statement and lines 2–3 in the hymn to Dike (hymn 62) has been noticed, but it would be unwise to build a hypothesis of composition on what must have become a common metaphor.1
But the Orphic Hymns still may have existed quite early and gone unnoticed. After all, antiquity treated the much older Homeric hymns with astonishing indifference. Those scholars who place the composition of the Orphic Hymns within the first four centuries of our era are probably closer to the truth. The relative purity of the language and the nearly flawless hexameter would argue for the earlier part of this period. So would also the remarkable absence of anything faintly Christian. There is a syncretism, but the syncretism is that of unmistakably pagan elements. The content of the Hymns themselves yields nothing certain. However, the hymn to Apollon (hymn 34) contains some specific musical technical terms, and the collocation of ideas in lines 16–23 strongly suggests that the composer was at least vaguely familiar with Ptolemy’s Harmonics.2 This would provide a terminus post quem of about 200 AD. It is true that we have scant evidence for the existence of Orphic cults in the later Roman imperial period. On the other hand, the predilection of the Severan dynasty (193 to 235 AD) for Eastern institutions and ideas favored a movement for religious reform and a tolerance that eventually culminated in the resuscitation and flourishing of many mystic, especially Dionysian, cults. It may have been exactly in this sort of climate and at such a time that underground remnants of Orphism surfaced again to reassert the tenacity of the legendary divine musician of Thrace. Perhaps then a date in the middle of the third century AD is as good a guess as any.
The place in which the Hymns were composed and originally used is a mystery. The appearance in the Hymns of divinities hardly known or totally unknown to mainland Greece should turn our attention eastward to Asia Minor, where, in fact, the names of some of these less known Asiatic gods have been consistently turning up in inscriptions. The three most telling names are Mise, Hipta, and Melinoe, all three previously known only from the Hymns until the soil of western Anatolia revealed their existence in inscriptions. Otto Kern in 1911 was the first to suggest that Pergamum was the birthplace of the Hymns and that they were used in mystic Dionysian ceremonies in the temenos of Demeter in the city. His suggestion has found both sympathizers and critics among scholars. Until epigraphic and other evidence points to some other place we might consider Kern’s theory a distinct possibility.
The Orphic Hymns constitute a distinct collection, and they should be seen as one part of a vast ancient literature that modern scholars label “Orphic.” However, the term “Orphic” is somewhat misleading. It implies something unified, stable, and definable—something like a movement, a genre, a type of phenomenon. But in actuality “Orphic” is a sort of catch-all term that is used to designate anything and everything directly or indirectly connected to Orpheus. And who this figure was leads to even more ambiguity. We do not know if he ever existed. Traditionally he was from the wilds of Thrace, a foreigner to the Greeks, and a bard of great renown, sometimes thought to be even earlier than Homer and Hesiod. He was so proficient with his stringed instrument, the lyre, that he could sway inanimate objects and even bring the lord and lady of the dead to tears. In addition to his amazing musical talents, he knew of secret rites, usually those of Dionysos, and particularly those dealing with the salvation of the soul after death, and these he taught to his fellow man in the form of mysteries. Indeed, Orpheus himself descended to the land of death in order to win back his beloved Eurydike, who had died before her time. His tragic failure has become one of the most haunting legacies bequeathed to us by the poets of old. There were in fact a number of poems in circulation attributed to Orpheus in the ancient world. Some seem to have been quite old, perhaps even pre-Classical, but others were composed at a later time and claimed to be his. These poems have come down to us in fragments, quoted or alluded to in an astonishing variety of authors from all periods, in both prose and poetry and in both Greek and Latin. The fragments are assiduously collected in Bernabé’s Teubner edition. While geared to scholars, even readers with little or no knowledge of ancient languages will find it a useful resource. Bernabé gathers the primary sources, and, with a little tenacity in learning the abbreviations for author and work, one can easily track down a suitable English translation for most of them.
Two notable Orphic documents may be mentioned here. The first one is an extremely important papyrus text that was discovered in Macedonia in 1962, known as the Derveni Papyrus and datable to the second half of the fourth century BC. It is in a lacunose state, but there is ample enough material to determine that the author was writing a philosophical interpretation of some theogonic poem he ascribes to Orpheus.3 Another is a group known as the Bacchic gold tablets. There are thirty-nine of these, dating from 400 BC to 200 AD, found from Rome to Asia Minor, from Macedonia to Krete. They are inscriptions on thin gold leaf that were found in graves. Some just have a name, presumably of the person buried, who was an initiate in the mysteries. Some contain instructions for the soul on what to do once it arrives at the underworld in order to secure its special dispensation, its reward for being initiated in the mysteries while living.4
One important fact that clearly emerges from this “Orphic” literature is that there had developed what we may call an “Orphic” mythology, one that appropriated much from the “official” mythologies in Homer and Hesiod but extended them in idiosyncratic ways. Cosmogony/theogony was a widely disseminated type, although there were numerous variations. Three versions were preserved by the Neoplatonist Damascius, who attributed one to the Peripatetic Eudemos and another to a certain Hieronymos and/or Hellanikos and who cited a third from a poem he called the Orphic Rhapsodies (probably the same as the one that appears elsewhere under the title of Sacred Discourses in Twenty-Four Rhapsodies).5 Despite these many and convoluted accounts, certain details are found again and again in our sources with enough consistency that we can at times with some confidence desi
gnate something as “Orphic” or at least influenced by “Orphic” literature. Our collection is “Orphic” in this sense.
There is little to force us to the assumption of a single authorship for all the Hymns. Indeed, we can scarcely assume that the collection was composed at once. The opening to Mousaios, for example, has come under suspicion.6 However, the Hymns do give the impression of being the work of a religious antiquary who had ready access to some sort of concordance from which he marshaled forth hosts of epithets that he then linked together in hexameters. This is more or less the view of Christian Lobeck, a view that is bound to be shared by those who consider the Hymns literary rather than religious documents. Albrecht Dieterich and Kern, and later William Guthrie, have taken exception to this opinion. It is reasonable to think that when in the third century AD many Dionysian cults were revived and made to serve as a convenient umbrella for the resurrection of Orphic elements, revered literary sources and earlier ritual practices, such as the Eleusinian mysteries, were tapped for the creation of appropriate cult literature. Every religion known to man is an amalgamation of various religious movements. Here we must mention the concept of the bricoleur suggested by Fritz Graf and Sarah Johnston in discussing how the peculiar Orphic mythology might have been developed.7
The Hymns stand as a particular example of a very old genre that survived throughout antiquity. A hymn is essentially a poem sung in praise of a god, often with a request or prayer. The word “hymn” can be used as a generic term, or to designate a specific genre, such as Pindar’s hymns. Over time, a wide variety developed. A hymn might contain narrative, long or short, such as some of the Homeric hymns. A hymn might have cultic function, such as the Kretan hymn found at Palaikastro that invokes Zeus as the greatest kouros (fourth century BC, possibly older). A hymn can be purely lyrical, such as those of Mesomedes (mid-second century AD), some of whose works survive with musical notation. We find hymns as dedications, inscribed on pillars or walls, such as the four hymns by Isidoros of the Fayum (88–80 BC). Some scraps of poetry found in the magical papyri, often metrically faulty, have been titled “hymns” by scholars, but one should regard the reconstructed versions by the editor of the papyri, Karl Preisendanz, with caution. Philosophers wrote hymns, too, such as the Stoic Kleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus (early- to mid-third century BC) and the surviving group by the Neoplatonist Proclus (fifth century AD). Prose was also a vehicle for hymns. The story of Atlantis that Kritias tells is prefaced with a thanks to Sokrates and also noted as a kind of hymn in honor of Athene, whose festival, the Panathenaia, was taking place (Plato Timaios 21a). A number of prose hymns were written by Aelius Aristides (mid-second century AD). Hymns can also be embedded in other works. In Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Lucius has had it with being a literal ass, and, after bathing himself seven times in a river (seven being a holy number according to Pythagoras), he invokes Isis the moon goddess in hymnic style (11.2). Finally, Ovid, as one would expect, plays with the genre when he has his lovesick Apollon call out to the fleeing Daphne the identity of her pursuer in terms that are typical of the genre: a list of favorite cult sites and the wide powers of the divinity addressed (Metamorphoses 1.515–524). The joke is that it is the god himself, not the petitioner, who utters the hymn; the inversion is both a mocking and serious testament to the power of love.8
