Prayer to Hera

A modern LABRYS text (see greek-agathodaimon-001), and the borrowing is stated in the source itself: "adapted from Orphic".

What has been taken is the sixteenth Orphic hymn, to Hera, which stands in this corpus as a card of its own (orphic-hera-001). It has been taken almost whole: air-shaped, the dark-blue hollows, the soul-nourishing breath, mother of rains, nurse of winds, "nothing has known the nature of life without you", mingled with the holy air. Scarcely anything is omitted.

And this is worth comparing with how the same book treated the hymn to Demeter (greek-demeter-luck-001). There, for the same "ceremony for luck", everything agricultural was cut out of the Orphic hymn — the seed, the heap, the threshing floor, the yoke on the oxen's neck — and wealth and prosperity were left. Here nothing has been cut.

The reason is simple. The Orphic Hera was already an abstraction in antiquity: not a wife and not a queen but air, and there was nothing in her to discard on moving to a city. Demeter consisted entirely of labours, and the labours vanished along with the field.

Hence a rule that holds well beyond this book: a cult travels across centuries the more easily the less it is fastened to a place and a trade. What survives is what was nailed to nothing.