Hearing divine voice in the orphic hymns
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14409/argos.2025.54.e0087Palabras clave:
voice, sound, hymns, music, communicationResumen
Communication between humans and the divine is a central poetic preoccupation of the Orphic Hymns, and indeed the genre of hymns more broadly. The Orphic Hymns are performed in a human voice. And yet the hymns ask no spoken response from the divine they invoke, nor do they attribute any directly spoken words to the gods, diverging from earlier hymnic tradition, which frequently put words in the mouths of the gods. When the Orphic Hymns assert the presence of the gods and request their goodwill they represent divine presence as markedly sensory, accompanied by sounds. Noise pervades the language of the hymns; song, raucous dance, and roaring cries are encountered throughout the collection. This paper will argue that the communicatory “voice” of the divine in the Orphic Hymns is an interesting mixture of vocality and sonority. Vocality is constructed through the repeated use of sonically-charged epithets and short phrases – the divine are loud-roaring, lyre-playing, bronze-crashing. This paper will examine the unique handling, in this collection, of communicatory poetics between humans and the divine, and the way that divine voice, constructed in this way, communicates with ritual practitioners.
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