Orphic Hymns

Eighty-seven hymns, none long, each addressed to a single divine power and built almost entirely out of epithets: Hekate is of the roads, of the tomb, of the sea, saffron-robed, bull-faced, keeper of the keys. The accumulation is the point. To name a god by every name is to leave no aspect of that god unaddressed, and the hymn ends by asking the power so summoned to come and be kindly.

What marks these out from literary hymnography is the rubric attached to nearly every one, naming the substance to burn with it: storax, myrrh, frankincense, aromatic herbs, and for the powers of the underworld, no incense at all but a libation. Those are stage directions. They indicate that this is the order of service of a real cult association, and the sequence in which the hymns are arranged (beginning at night, moving through the cosmic powers, the Olympians, the nature powers and the chthonic deities), looks like the shape of an actual nocturnal rite rather than an editor's filing system.

The attribution to Orpheus is pseudonymous, in the ordinary ancient manner: a body of ritual poetry is put under the name of the mythical singer whose authority it claims. Composition is placed in the second or third century CE, most probably in Asia Minor, on the basis of language, metre and the make-up of the pantheon.

"Orphic" in the title of this collection does not mean what it means in discussions of the gold leaves from south Italian graves, or of the Derveni papyrus, or of the theogonies in which Phanes is born from an egg. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship assembled all of that into a single reconstructed religion, "Orphism", complete with a doctrine of original sin and a church. That construction has been dismantled. What is left is a scatter of related texts and practices across a thousand years, sharing an appeal to Orpheus and an interest in the fate of the soul, and not amounting to an organised religion. These hymns belong to that scatter, and their theology is not the theology of the gold leaves.

Their afterlife has been disproportionate. The Byzantine manuscripts reached Italy in the fifteenth century, where Marsilio Ficino sang the hymns to his own lyre accompaniment and treated them as an ancient theology consonant with Platonism and with Christianity. Through Ficino and the Florentine Platonists they entered Renaissance magic, and from there the whole Western esoteric tradition; they are still in use in modern Hellenic polytheist practice. A reader meeting them today is more likely to be meeting Ficino's Orphic Hymns than the Asia Minor cult association's, and the distinction is worth keeping.