The Hymns of Athena
Athena and Hermes lead the Hero
to the Temple of Virtue
Rubens, 1625
O V E R V I E W
The Homeric Hymns
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three Hymns, ascribed to Homer, and is the last considerable work of the Epic School. On the whole, they seem to be later than the Iliad and the Odyssey. It cannot be definitely assigned either to the Ionian or Continental schools, for while the romantic element is very strong, there is a distinct genealogical interest; and in matters of diction and style the influences of both Hesiod and Homer are well-marked.
The date of the formation of the collection as such is unknown. Diodorus (temp. Augustus) is the first to mention such a body of poetry, and it is likely enough that this is, at least substantially, the one which has come down to us. Thucydides quotes the Delian Hymn to Apollo, and it is possible that the Homeric corpus of his day also contained other of the more important hymns. Conceivable the collection was arranged in the Alexandrine period.
Thucydides,in quoting the Hymn to Apollo, calls it prooimion, wich ordinarily means a prelude chanted by a rhapsode before recitation of a lay from Homer, and such hymns as #6, #31, #32, are clearly preludes in the strict sense; in #31, for exemple, after celebrating Helios, the poet declares he will next sing of the race of mortal men, the demi-Gods. But it may fairly be doubted whether such Hymns as those to Demeter (#2), Apollo (#3), Hermes (#4), Aphrodite (#5), can have been real preludes, in spite of the closing formula and now I will pass on to another hymn. The view taken by Allen and Sikes, amongst other scholars, is doubtless right, that these longer hymns are only technically preludes.
There are two Homeric Hymns to the Goddess Athena, one extolling her virtues and the other recounting her birth.
The Orphic Hymns
The Orphic Hymns are a collection of eighty-seven ritual invocations which were used by initiates of the Orphic mystery cult. They were probably composed between 100 BCE and 150 CE.
Orphism is a mystic cult in Greco-Roman (Hellenic) religion, drawn from the writings of the legendary poet and musician Orpheus. Fragmentary poetic passages, including inscriptions on gold tablets found in the graves of Orphic followers from the 6th century BCE, indicate that Orphism is based on a cosmogony that centers on the God Dionysus Zagreus, the son of the deities Zeus and Persephone.
Furious because Zeus wished to make his son ruler of the universe, the jealous Titans dismembered and devoured the young God. The Goddess Athena, Goddess of wisdom, was able to rescue his heart, which she brought to Zeus, who swallowed it and gave birth to a new Dionysus. Zeus then punished the Titans by destroying them with his lightning and from their ashes created the human race. As a result, humans had a dual nature: the earthly body was the heritage of the earth-born Titans; the soul came from the divinity of Dionysus, whose remains had been mingled with that of the Titans.
According to the tenets of Orphism, people should endeavour to rid themselves of the Titanic, or evil, element in their nature and should seek to preserve the Dionysiac, or divine, nature of their being. The triumph of the Dionysiac element would be assured by following the Orphic rites of purification and asceticism. Through a long series of reincarnations, people would prepare for the afterlife. If they had lived in evil, they would be punished, but if they had lived in holiness, after death their souls would be completely liberated from Titanic elements and reunited with the divinity.
The Orphic Hymn to Athena celebrates the Goddess who was able to rescue the heart of Dionysus, or the divine nature of the human being.
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