Hymn to Dionysus Liknites

Dionysus Liknites — "he of the liknon". The liknon is a plain object: a flat wicker basket for winnowing grain. A newborn was laid in one, and one was carried in Dionysiac and Eleusinian procession with its contents covered.

Three things meet in a single implement: threshing, a cradle, and a mystery. The god's title holds all three at once, and none should be chosen at the expense of the others — Dionysus in that basket is grain, and infant, and the thing that must not be seen.

The descent here is again not the received one: νυμφῶν ἔρνος ἐραστὸν ἐυστεφάνου τ᾽ Ἀφροδίτης, beloved shoot of the nymphs and of fair-crowned Aphrodite. The reference is more to nurture than to birth, but that too is Orphic: "by the counsels of Zeus, brought to noble Persephone, he was reared". His nurse is named as the queen of the dead.

Ἐπ᾽ εὐχαῖς ταῖσδε κικλήσκω — at these prayers I call. The hymn points at itself: "these prayers" are what is being spoken now. An indication of ritual time, of which there are many in the collection, as the fumigation rubrics also show (orphic-amphietus-001).