The Orphic Hymns Read online

  5 all-conquering: The Greek word is “pankrates.” This was the name of a god in Athens who was represented as a mature, bearded man accompanied by a younger, unbearded man. This younger man is sometimes called Pankrates Herakles in dedications, and he bears the traditional Heraklean attributes of lion skin and club (see Mikalson 1998, p. 144 n. 20).

  5 archer and seer: Both of these are also attributes of Apollon; see note to line 10.

  6: This line is noticeable for its collocation of words meaning “all” (including “omnivorous”), which is “pan” in ancient Greek, and thus evocative of the preceding hymn. For other cases where we find Pan and Herakles in proximity, see OH 11i and the note to line 10 below.

  10 Paion: An alternate name of Apollon (see OH 34.1n), also spelled “Paian,” it is used of a number of other personalities in the collection, almost all of whom share affinities with Herakles in this hymn. His association with Sun is discussed in the note to line 3 above. Pan is called Paian in the previous hymn, which bears other similarities with this one (see also note to line 6 above). Paian is also used of Asklepios at OH 67.1, and elsewhere we find Herakles associated with this god as well. Aristides (see OH 86i) relates a story told to him by a stranger, who claimed that in a dream he had sung a hymn to Herakles composed by Aristides that began “ie Paian Herakles Asklepios!” (Orations 40.12). It is therefore notable that Herakles is asked to bring “all charms against disease” in line 14. In fact at Athens, he was invoked to keep plagues away (Larson 2007, p. 185; see p. 220 n. 7 for references). One of Herakles’ adventures was the killing of the eagle that had been devouring Prometheus’ liver, and Hesiod metaphorically calls the eagle a “disease” (Theogony 523–534). Both Herakles and Asklepios are culture heroes, and this would naturally facilitate a closer relation between them; see also OH 67i.

  15 club in hand: This is one of the most common iconographic attributes of Herakles. He also often wears the skin of the Nemean Lion like a cowl.

  16: The last three labors of Herakles (cattle of Geryon, apples of the Hesperides, Kerberos) are instances that fit the wide-spread mythological pattern of the hero overcoming death. During his last labor, he sometimes is credited with freeing Theseus from the underworld, where he had been trapped for his role in assisting Peirithoös’ attempt to abduct Persephone. Herakles actually wrestles Death (Greek Thanatos) in order to win back the soul of the departed Alkestis (see Euripides’ play of the same name). Herakles as a liberator from death (the threat of death, the mundane existence of the soul in the underworld) fits in well with the concerns of the initiates in Dionysian mystery cults (and see the introduction to this hymn). The “poisonous darts” refers to the arrows that Herakles dipped in the poisonous blood of the slain Hydra.

  13. To Kronos

  Kronos is traditionally the youngest of the Titans, one of three broods born to Earth and Sky. He is the one who castrates his father and consequently frees the other Titans who had been blocked from exiting the womb of Earth. The other two fraternal groups, the Hundred-Handers and the Kyklopes, he deigns not to liberate. Earth and Sky get their revenge when they advise Kronos’ wife Rhea on how to put an end to her husband’s ingestion of their children. This involves the trick of substituting a stone for the newly born Zeus, who eventually overthrows his father. Kronos and most of the other Titans attempt to overpower the upstart Zeus and his brethren in the long, pitched battle known as the Titanomachy, but Zeus is able to prevail and imprisons the enemy Titans in Tartaros, a particularly murky area in the underworld. For details, see Hesiod Theogony 132–210, 453–506, and 617–731. In general, Orphic theogony appears to have appropriated many of these traditional elements, although in one account Zeus tricks Kronos by getting him drunk with honey (wine having not yet been invented, doubtlessly due to the fact that Dionysos had not yet been born) and castrating him in turn (see Orphic fragment 220, 222, and 225; see also PGM 4.3100). Kronos, along with the Titans, is also responsible for the brutal murder of Dionysos in Orphic lore, and it is the destruction of the Titans by Zeus that leads to the birth of the human race (see note to line 1 below).

  While Kronos is cast in the role as adversary to the gods, there is an alternate, positive strand in his mythology. In Hesiod’s myth of the five races of man, the first and best, the Golden race, enjoys a paradisiacal existence under Kronos’ rule (Works and Days 109–126). A similar kind of lifestyle is enjoyed by certain select members of humanity after death in the Elysian Fields or on the Isle of the Blest. In Homer, it is relatives of Zeus that qualify for such an honorific dispensation (e.g., Menelaos, as a son-in-law of Zeus, at Odyssey 4.561–569). In Hesiod it is an unspecified number of men of the Heroic race that are awarded a carefree life (one similar to that of the Golden race) after death (Works and Days 166–173; compare the more agonistic Norse notion of Valhalla). Pindar designates the Isle of the Blest as a place for “those who have endured/three times in either realm/to keep their souls untainted/by any injustice” (Olympian Odes 2.68–70, translation by Nisetich 1980) and explicitly says that these souls will “travel/Zeus’ road to the tower of Kronos,” (ibid., 70–71) located on the islands where the dead bask in leisure (72–80). For the idea of “ethical selection” after death and the promise of blessings in the afterlife for Orphic initiates, see Graf/Johnston 2007, pp. 100–105 and 115–116. At a festival called the Kronia, celebrated in Athens and elsewhere in Greece, the slaves would join their masters at the feast and, according to one source, were served by them (cf. the Roman Saturnalia). The effacement of social class probably has its roots in the idea of a “golden age,” when there was no need to toil on the land and hence no slavery (Burkert 1985, pp. 231–232). Kronos shared a temple with Rhea and Earth at Athens (Pausanias 1.18.7).

  Our hymn seems little concerned with the mythological Kronos, either in his positive or negative aspects. He is addressed as an august ancient divinity, and in particular his association with Time, an integral deity in the Orphic theogonies, is stressed (see note on line 3). In the previous hymn Herakles is identified with Time and is called a Titan (lines 3 and 1, respectively, and see notes). This hymn neatly transitions to the all-important Olympian gods through the illustrious pair of Kronos and Rhea, the parents of Zeus (for similar pairings, see OH 14.8–9n).

  1 father of blessed gods and men: As Time (see note to line 3), he is indeed the father of gods and men, since he sired the primeval elements, Khaos, Erebos, and Ether. This line, though, admits of other interpretations. The “blessed gods” could be a specific reference to the Olympian gods, of whom Kronos, either directly or indirectly, may rightly be called the “father.” He also may be considered as father of men in the sense that he is the most prominent of the Titans, out of whom man was born in Orphic myth (see OH 37i), or to the extent that he might be identified with Prometheus (see note to line 7), who very often is credited with the creation of man (e.g., Aristophanes Birds 686, Plato Protagoras 320d; cf. the creation of Pandora by Hephaistos, a god with some similarities to Prometheus, at Hesiod Works and Days 60–63 and 70–71; see also OH 66i). Note that in the spell “Oracle of Kronos” found in the magical papyri, Kronos is credited with creating “the entire inhabited world” (PGM 4.3099). See also “progenitor” in line 8. The birthing theme found in the previous hymns continues. In the following hymn, Kronos’ wife Rhea is called “mother of gods/and of mortals” (OH 14.8–9).

  3 you consume all things and replenish them: The identification of Kronos with Time (Greek Khronos) is a later development, but one that was easily made. The idea of consuming and replenishing perhaps hints at the swallowing and subsequent regurgitation of his children and thus might have facilitated equating Kronos to Time. Note, too, that his son Zeus swallows and then “recreates” the entire world in the theogony found in the Rhapsodies (Orphic fragment 241). Kronos is the source of our “Father Time,” whose sickle, incidentally, has its origins as the device used to castrate Sky. Further references to Kronos as Time in our hymn can be found in lines 5 and
7.

  4: The “unbreakable chains” of Kronos are proverbial. Plato portrays them as being inferior to the “bonds of virtue” by which Hades keeps the virtuous dead in his kingdom (Cratylus 404a). In the magical papyri, they turn up in a binding spell (PGM 4.2326) as an attribute of Moon, along with a scepter that has writing on it authored by Kronos (PGM 4.2841), and in the spell called the Oracle of Kronos (PGM 4.3086–3124).

  6 child of Earth, child of starry Sky: A similar formulation is found in Hesiod Theogony 106 for all the gods born of Earth and Sky. The Titans as a group are called the “glorious children of Sky and Earth” in their hymn (OH 37.1). Many of the Bacchic gold tablets instruct the initiate to claim that he or she is a child of Earth and starry Sky and of a heavenly race; see OH 4i and compare the claim made by the initiate to Persephone and the other underworld gods that he or she is from the same race (see Graf/Johnston 2007, nos. 5, 6, and 7, as well their discussion on pp. 111–114).

  7 revered and prudent lord of Rhea: Rhea is both sister and wife to Kronos; see the following hymn. The word translated as “prudent” is “promētheu,” which some have translated as “Prometheus,” thus positing an equivalence between these two proverbially clever Titans. The craftiness and intelligence of Kronos is emphasized in this hymn: he is “resourceful” (line 2), “of the shifting stories” (line 5), and “wily” (line 9). A further reason why these two figures are blended might be their involvement in the creation of man (see note to line 1).

  14. To Rhea

  Rhea is a Titan, daughter of Earth and Sky, and the sister of Kronos, whom she married after he successfully rebelled against Sky. Her place in mythology was essentially limited to her importance as the mother of Zeus and in particular her role in the succession myth between her son and husband/brother (see OH 13i). However, she accrued more prominence when she was later identified with Kybele, the great Phrygian mountain mother of the gods, who was also known as Mother (Greek Mētēr), and Mother of the Gods. This is one of many equivalences that was made between a Greek goddess of fertility and the Phrygian goddess. The lyric poet Melanippides (ca. mid-fifth century BC) equated Demeter and Mother (PMG 764), while the lyric poet Telestes (late fifth century BC) also added Rhea to the equation (PMG 809). Such identifications apparently had already been made in early Orphic thought, for the author of the Derveni papyrus quotes the following from a poem he attributes to Orpheus, “Earth, Meter, Rhea, Hera, Demeter, Hestia, and Deio” (for this last name, see OH 40.1n), while also giving some etymologizing explanations for the various appellations (Orphic fragment 398, and see Betegh 2004, pp. 189–190). In our collection, there is some overlap between this hymn and the one addressed to the Mother of the Gods (OH 27); compare also the ones to Earth (OH 26) and Eleusinian Demeter (OH 40). We find some correspondences as well with the Homeric Hymn to the Mother of the Gods and, to a lesser extent, the Homeric Hymn to Earth, Mother of All. In Orphic mythology, Zeus, in the form of a snake, mates with his mother, Rhea, who had also changed herself into a snake to escape the advances of her son, which leads to the birth of Persephone (Orphic fragment 87). Here we find a blending of Demeter, Persephone’s traditional mother, and Rhea (see also OH 29i). The monstrous appearance of Persephone frightened Rhea so much that she refused to offer her breast to the child (Orphic fragment 88), a motif also found in the Homeric Hymn to Pan (see OH 11i). Rhea is the one who puts the pieces of her grandson Dionysos back together after he is murdered by the Titans (for references and further discussion, see Graf/Johnston 2007, pp. 75–77).

  The position of this hymn emphasizes Rhea’s prestige as the wife of Kronos and the mother of Zeus, her customary associations in Greek mythology. However, the content of the hymn itself vacillates between stressing this side of the goddess and her identification with Kybele; see notes passim.

  1 daughter of many-faced Protogonos: This is true, insofar as Rhea is considered the same as Earth, for in one version of the Orphic myth of creation, Protogonos and Night give birth to Earth and Sky (Orphic fragment 149). Strictly speaking, though, she is their granddaughter.

  2 bull-slayers: This is a kenning for lions, animals typically associated with Kybele. See further OH 27.2+n.

  3 you dance to the sound of drums and cymbals, O frenzy-loving maiden: Percussive instruments are characteristic of the ecstatic elements of Kybele’s cult; see OH 27.11n. Euripides explicitly associates this with Rhea in the Bacchae. The chorus of Bacchantes first sings of the dance of the Kouretes to the drums and auloi as they protected the infant Zeus, which is presented as the invention of the custom. Next, the chorus tells us, the drum was passed down to Rhea, from whom the maddened satyrs stole it. Finally, it reached the hands of the Kouretes for use in Dionysian ritual (120–134). The Phrygian drum of Rhea is mentioned earlier in the play by the chorus (58–59). For the role of madness in this cult, see line 6 below and OH 27.13n, which supplies further references to the theme of insanity that runs throughout the Hymns. Rhea’s connection to the ecstatic Kouretes and the Kretan cave cult of Zeus probably facilitated her identification with the Phrygian goddess, who was associated with a similar band of ecstatic youths, the Korybantes (see OH 27i and OH 31i). Wild dancing is also typical of maenadic worship; see OH 52i.

  6 horrid shrieks of mortals: The conjunction of this phrase with “in the mountains” probably means these shrieks are those of the worshippers of Dionysos, possessed by the god and in a state of ecstasy. They can be “horrid,” because of the terrible things that these raving adherents sometimes effect; an example is their tearing apart of Pentheus, which Euripides grippingly portrays in the Bacchae. Likewise, this phrase might refer to madness in general (see note to line 3). To be sure, ecstasy and madness are concepts that the Greeks did not consider completely distinct from one another, and we, too, need not be detained by a pedantic precision; see further OH 30i.

  8 liar, savior, redeemer: Quandt has postulated that “liar” refers to Rhea’s deception of her husband at the birth of Zeus, and he draws attention to Pausanias, who describes Kronos as being deceived by his sister-wife (9.41.6). She thus can also be considered “savior” and “redeemer” of the child, just as she sometimes is of Dionysos in Orphic mythology (see the introduction to this hymn). There may also be an oblique reference to this tale in Apollodoros who says that after Dionysos had been driven insane by Hera, he came to Mount Kybela in Phrygia where he was purified by Rhea and taught initiatory rites (3.5.1; see also Graf/Johnston 2007, pp. 146–147, and OH 27.13n). However, soteriological and redemptive powers turn up throughout the collection among other divinities, often near the close of the hymn when the addressee is enjoined to appear.

  8–9 mother of gods / and of mortals: This is paralleled by Kronos being called “father of blessed gods and men” (OH 13.1+n). Kybele is also expressly attributed as such (OH 27.7); see also OH 26.1+n. There are other mother goddesses in the collection (see OH 10.1n), as well as a number of explicit male/female pairings: Night/Sky (OH 3/4), Zeus/Hera (OH 15/16), Nereus/Nereids (OH 23/24), Persephone/Dionysos (OH 29/30), Sabazios/Hipta (OH 48/49), Aphrodite/Adonis (OH 55/56), Asklepios/Hygeia (OH 67/68), Tyche/Daimon (OH 72/73), and Leukothea/Palaimon (OH 74/75); see also OH 61i, OH 69i, and OH 76i.

  9–10 earth, / … sky … sea … winds: These lines elevate Rhea to the status of the primeval womb of creation; compare the Homeric Hymn to Earth, Mother of All: “Her beauty nurtures all creatures that walk upon the land,/and all that move in the deep or fly in the air” (30.3–4). Insofar as the sky is connected with ether, and hence fire, these four physical items are symbolic of the four elements that constitute the physical world (see OH 11.2–3n). A similar range of natural features (albeit without the symbolism of the four elements) appears in Apollonios of Rhodes Argonautika 1.1098–1099, when the seer Mopsos advises Jason to propitiate Mother of the Gods, “for on her the winds and sea and earth’s foundations/all depend, and the snowy bastion of Olympos” (translation by Green 1997). See also OH 27, addressed to the same Mother of the Gods,
the “queen of the sky” (line 4), to whom the earth belongs (line 6) and who “hold[s] sway over the rivers and over all the sea” (line 8). In the Epidaurian hymn to Mother of the Gods, she asks for half of heaven, earth, and sea, apparently in recompense for the abduction of her daughter (19–24; see also OH 27i). For other mentions of the earth, sea, and sky in the collection, see OH 10.14–16n. The mention of the winds last neatly transitions to the attributes “ethereal” and “restless” in the next line.