Eighty-seven short hymns to the gods, each one headed by a note on what to burn while you sing it.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear The Orphic Hymns — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like — a few dollars helps, or fund the whole of The first hymns and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. The Orphic Hymns’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
A prayer book. The Orphic Hymns call on the gods one at a time: Hekate, Night, Sky, the Sun, Dionysus in many forms, Persephone, the Furies, Sleep, Dream and Death. Above most of them is a line naming the incense to offer, frankincense or storax or myrrh or saffron. This is the first text the founder of this library ever tried to translate word by word, and it is in the press now. It isn't readable here yet.
The hymns carry the name of Orpheus, the mythical singer who went down to the underworld and came back, but they were written much later, most likely in the second or third century AD, and probably for one religious community in western Asia Minor. They open with an address to Musaeus, Orpheus' legendary pupil, and the last of them is a hymn to Death. The Greek is the old epic hexameter of Homer.
Most of each hymn is names. Night is mother of gods and of men; Dionysus collects dozens of titles, some of them found nowhere else in Greek. In a translation these lists blur into a drone. Word by word, each epithet turns back into a small compressed story, and you can take them apart one at a time.
Making an interlinear The Orphic Hymns is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, The first hymns gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true The Orphic Hymns that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the The Orphic Hymns opens — no other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.