Orphic Hymns

• 1. Introduction

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  The Orphic Hymns are eighty-seven brief Greek poems that summon gods by reciting their many names. They open not with a story but with a roll call. In the proem, Orpheus addresses the poet Musaeus and calls on around seventy deities to attend a rite. The rite happened at night. As each hymn was spoken, an offering of spice or frankincense or myrrh was probably set alight, the smoke rising into the dark. Yet for centuries no one knew who made these poems, where, or when. No ancient writer mentions them. They surface only in the 12th century, in the work of a Byzantine commentator. So who composed them, and for whom did they burn their incense? Why does one god, Dionysus, command eight hymns of his own while others get a few lines? And how did a slim collection from the coast of Asia Minor end up convincing Renaissance scholars they were reading the genuine voice of a mythical poet older than Homer?

• 2. Voices In The Smoke

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  Dionysus receives eight separate hymns, more than any other deity, and is named in twenty-two of the eighty-seven poems. The collection treats him as its center. The word boukolos appears in the Hymns, a religious title often used elsewhere for worshippers of Dionysus, and sometimes connected to Orpheus. From clues like this, scholars conclude he was the central god of the cult that recited these poems. Some describe the group as Dionysian or Bacchic.

  Morand reads a whole religious hierarchy inside the text. There are the mustai, the regular members mentioned most often. There are the neomustai, the new initiates. The mustipoloi handled initiation and ritual activity, and the orgiophantai seem to have led initiation rites and perhaps displayed holy objects. Richard Martin pushes back on this, calling it treating hymnic vocabulary as hard evidence.

  The ceremony itself was the telete, a word that usually means a rite of initiation into mysteries. The Hymns mention it repeatedly, including the pantheios telete, an initiation to all the gods. It took place at night and may have included a tambourine. The term orgion appears several times, possibly referring to sacred objects used in the rite. Fritz Graf suggests the hymn to Hecate sits first because a hekataion, a triple-shaped image of the goddess, stood at the entrance the initiates passed before they began.

• 3. The Architecture Of Eighty-Seven Poems

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  The second hymn addresses Prothyraia, a goddess of birth, and the final one addresses Thanatos, Death, ending on the word geras, meaning old age. The sequence runs from birth to death. Primordial deities come first, with Nyx, Uranus, Aether, and Protogonos near the opening, and later gods follow further on. Gods who resemble one another sit side by side, such as the Stars, Sun, and Moon in hymns seven through nine, or Zeus and Hera, linked by marriage, in hymns fifteen and sixteen.

  Marie-Christine Fayant sees a chiastic structure, five groups of deities arranged around a Dionysian core. Daniel Malamis argues instead for a tripartite design, with sections opening on Hecate, Hermes, and Hermes Chthonius, all gods of boundaries. Beneath these patterns runs another order. The arrangement appears to follow the narrative of one or more Orphic theogonies, with particular parallels to the Orphic Rhapsodies.

  Each individual hymn has three internal parts. The invocation is brief and grabs the god's attention, naming the deity and often calling on them with a verb. The development is the long central section, built mostly from descriptions and epithets, meant to gratify the god into appearing. The request closes the hymn in a line or two, asking the god to listen and be present. Some hymns ask for health or prosperity. Others ask something specific, like the Clouds to bring rain, or Hygieia to ward off illness.

• 4. A God With Three Births

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  Strings of epithets make up much of every hymn, and their purpose is to seize the god's attention and summon their powers. Each appellation highlights an aspect of the deity, an element of their power, a place of worship, or a role in myth. Some epithets come from Homer and Hesiod. Others are neologisms, coined for the collection, sometimes pointing to a known cult title used in a particular place. Rudhardt argues that even these clustered adjectives carry a hidden syntax, where neighboring terms relate to each other in subtle ways.

  The Hymns dwell on one strand of Dionysus's mythology, his three births. In the standard version he is the child of Zeus and Semele. In the Orphic version he is born to Zeus and his own daughter, Persephone. The collection names both parentages. It mentions the birth of Eubuleus, a name for Dionysus, to Zeus and Persephone in an unspeakable union, and later calls Semele his mother. Rudhardt reads this not as contradiction but as a system of two consecutive mothers, explained by the Orphic myth in which the infant Dionysus, son of Zeus and Persephone, is torn apart and eaten by the Titans, then reborn. His third birth comes from the thigh of the Phrygian god Sabazios, closely linked to Zeus, who stitches the child there after the birth from Semele.

  Protogonos is the only deity in the collection usually held to be Orphic, the first-born god who emerges from an egg, also called Ericepaios, Phanes, Priapus, and Antauges. Most of the other gods belong to mainstream Greek mythology. The collection also identifies certain deities with one another, drawing pairs so close they almost merge while each keeps its own traits. Rudhardt argues that Protogonos, Zeus, and Dionysus should be understood as aspects of a single tripartite Orphic deity. Giulia Sfameni Gasparro calls the collection henotheistic, revolving around Dionysus, who is at once one and many.

• 5. What The Smoke Was Made Of

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  Most hymns name an offering as part of their title, and only eight lack one. During the recitation, that offering would probably have been burned. The most common are spices, frankincense, storax, manna, and myrrh, sometimes in combination. A few hymns ask for something unique. Torches go to Nyx, saffron to Aether, poppies to Hypnos, and grain, with beans and herbs excluded, to Earth. The hymn to Amphietes asks for a libation of milk on top of its offering.

  A handful of these pairings make obvious sense, torches for the goddess of night, grain for Earth, but for most hymns the logic behind the offering is unclear. Gods linked to each other will sometimes share an offering. One absence stands out. No animals appear among the offerings at all. That silence may connect to a supposed prohibition of animal sacrifice in Orphic belief.

  The collection shows little interest in the afterlife. It never references metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul so often tied to Orphism. Paul Veyne says the Hymns care only about this world, not what comes after death. There is no explicit telling of any major Orphic myth, including the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans. One element, the Orphic anthropogony, may be hinted at in the hymn to the Titans, which calls them the ancestors of our fathers. Purity matters too. The hymn to Eros asks the god to come to the initiates and banish from them vile impulses, which may point to a code of sexual ethics.

• 6. Where And When

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  Deities like Mise, Hipta, and Melinoe are attested only in western Asia Minor, named in inscriptions from the region. Their presence is the strongest evidence tying the collection to that area, modern-day Turkey. The prominence of sea gods and the anxiety about the sea's dangers suggest the Hymns were written near the coast. In 1911, Otto Kern proposed the city of Pergamon, based on inscriptions found in its sanctuary of Demeter. Anne-France Morand, in her 2001 study, concludes Pergamon cannot be ruled out but cannot be confirmed either, since the relevant inscriptions come from across western Asia Minor.

  Estimates of the date have ranged widely, mostly between the 2nd century BC and the 5th century AD. Recent scholars usually settle on the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD. Gabriella Ricciardelli points to the strength of Dionysus worship in Asia Minor at that time. Morand places them between the 2nd and 5th centuries, a dating criticized for leaning too hard on vocabulary shared with the 5th-century poet Nonnus. Daniel Malamis argues a date as early as the 1st century AD, or even the 1st century BC, should not be excluded.

  The poet's identity is unknown, though most scholars agree on a single author. Some hymns may have been added later. Ricciardelli points to those for the Moirai, Hermes Chthonius, Mother Antaia, and Aphrodite. The attribution to Orpheus lives in the title and the proem's address to Musaeus, marking the work as his. In antiquity, ascribing a text to Orpheus lent it special authority and placed it even earlier than Homer, whom Orpheus was thought to precede. The collection speaks in his first-person voice. Two hymns allude to his parentage, naming mother Calliope and lord Apollo.

• 7. From A Lost Codex To Florence

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  John Diaconus Galenus, a Byzantine writer dated to the 12th century, gives the earliest definite reference to the Hymns. In his commentary on Hesiod's Theogony he mentions the collection three times, citing epithets and quoting lines from the hymns to Helios, Selene, and Hecate, and crediting Orpheus each time. At one point he mentions fragrances, showing he held a manuscript that included the offerings.

  Sometime between the 5th and 13th centuries, the Hymns were gathered into a single codex alongside the Homeric Hymns, the Orphic Argonautica, and the Hymns of Callimachus and Proclus. The earliest known codex containing them to reach Western Europe was carried from Constantinople to Venice by Giovanni Aurispa in 1423. In 1427, Francesco Filelfo brought another to Italy. Both are now lost. Around forty surviving codices remain, all dating between about 1450 and 1550. Most descend from a single archetype, marked in scholarship by the letter psi, probably a paper manuscript of the 12th or 13th century.

  Marsilio Ficino, a Neoplatonist, translated the Hymns into Latin in his youth, the apparent first translation, though it stayed unpublished. The first printed edition came out in Florence in 1500, produced by Filippo Giunta. The Aldine Press followed in 1517, and Marcus Musurus printed a Latin translation in 1519. The 1566 edition by Henri Estienne remained standard for two centuries, until Johann Matthias Gesner's Orphica in 1764. Thomas Taylor produced the first complete English translation in 1787.

• 8. Hogwash Or Liturgy

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  In the 1540s, Agostino Steuco and Giglio Gregorio Giraldi suggested the collection was the work of a second, later Orpheus. In 1627 Daniel Heinsius attributed it to the Athenian Onomacritus, and that view dominated the 17th century. Then the late 18th-century Gottingen school turned hostile. Johann Gottlob Schneider, noting no ancient author mentions the Hymns, argued they were made in late antiquity, probably the 3rd century AD, for a debate over Orphism between Christian and Neoplatonic apologists. He dismissed them as a hogwash of mystical sayings and allegorical prattlings. His contemporary Christoph Meiners called their style horridus.

  Gottfried Hermann's 1805 edition surpassed all before it, proposing over 170 corrections and adding the first critical apparatus. He was the first to split the hymn to Hecate from the proem and present it as the opening hymn, a choice nearly every later edition has kept. Christian Lobeck, in his 1829 Aglaophamus, held that a Byzantine-era author wrote them as a scholarly exercise, rejecting any cult. Christian Petersen later challenged him, seeing strong Stoic influence and dating the collection to the 1st or 2nd centuries AD.

  The ground shifted with the spade. In the late 19th century, excavations in western Asia Minor turned up inscriptions bearing the word boukolos, leading Rudolf Schoell in 1879 to argue the Hymns belonged to a Bacchic mystery group. About a decade later, Albrecht Dieterich produced a study scholars recognize as settling their ritual nature. Around 1910, after inscriptions to Hipta, Erikepaios, and Melinoe came to light, Otto Kern concluded the collection was composed in Asia Minor for a Dionysian cult. Modern scholarship has moved past the old verdict that the Hymns were trivial, with recent work, from Athanassakis's 1977 translation to Fayant's 2014 Bude edition, focusing on their ritual and performative life.