The Orphic Hymn of Hygeia (Health)
When "wellness" is about cosmic patterns, not individual prowess.
Business First:
Live Chat to discuss this hymn will be SUNDAY, Jan 12th, 2pm EST. A link is at the bottom of this post, after the Hymn translation.
I first translated the Hymn of Hygeia some time ago because as a disabled person looking to remediate aspects of my chronic illness (Less fatigue and heart palpitations, please!), I thought it couldn’t hurt to reinforce my relationship to Health.
I immediately sensed, however, that there was a LOT more going on in the hymn than a simple prayer requesting that Hygeia improve my circumstances. I mean, it is that, don’t get me wrong. But that little inner nudge I receive when translating told me I should set it aside for awhile, look at other hymns, and then come back to it - call it intuition, call it the Orphic ancestors, call it Orpheus himself or his mom, the Muse Calliope.
Whatever its source, I’ve learned over the years to trust this inner nudge and not rush things. The hymns come at their own schedule, and if I wait until they’re ready (or rather, till “they” judge I’M ready to facilitate the rebirth of the hymns’ encoded esoteric knowledge into the world) - if I wait, what DOES finally come is SO much fuller with gorgeous, generative fractal meaning.
And so it has been with Hygeia. She has led me into dimensions I had not foreseen.
I say “dimensions” because one of the most important aspects of the Orphic understanding of Health is its relationship to mathematics. Yes, you heard that right: mathematics.
In fact, the longer I sat with this hymn, the more I was led to understand Health as a vibrant, animate arithmetical pattern that underlays and structures the harmonious, balanced flourishing of life.
Living Patterns
Let me unpack that a bit. I’m not saying that Hygeia is ONLY an arithmetical pattern — that She is “just a bunch of numbers” or that if we discover just the right formula, we can somehow capture and “solve” the conundrum of ill-health.
Rather, I’m saying that for the Orphics (and then for the Pythagoreans, who were said by many ancient scholars to “follow” the Orphics on this point), NUMBERS THEMSELVES ARE ALIVE.
Drink that in for a moment. The Orphic Hymns, when read esoterically as they were meant to be, teach us that the patterns found in the cosmos are ALIVE in the full sense of the word. The patterns themselves have personality, have character, have a certain type of SENTIENCE — different, perhaps, than the sentience of humans, but sentience nonetheless.
For the Orphics, as for many indigenous cultures the world over, the very foundational structure of EVERYTHING — plants, rocks, animals, stars, and humans, but also laptops, pillowcases, coffee machines, and my pharmaceutical heart medication — is humming not just with an impersonal “life force,” but with sentience, personality, characteristics, and even agency.
The challenge, for us moderns, is to remember how to listen to the world. And one way the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers, including the Orphics, found to listen to the cosmos was through numbers and numerical patterns.
Now, as someone who suffers from severe math anxiety (the result of years spent in a strict, British colonial schooling system), the pre-Socratic obsession with all things number and ratio was at first, pretty intimidating. In fact, I’d pretty much actively avoided studying ancient number theory all through my grad education. But I’m coming around to the Orphic point of view, which I’d roughly summarize as this:
When we understand numbers, intervals, ratios, and mathematics in general as ALIVE, with all the features of living beings (including personality and agency), then the patterns they form can help us truly hear what the rocks, stars, and yes, even our coffee machines are telling us.
(Mine is telling me to fill up my cup again before I write this next section, but also speaks to me of the deepest ages of the Earth from which the plastic handle is made, and the broken bodies of the workers to labored to extract the metal ore of the strainer. And then again, it also emanates a sort of wonder — a happiness to be of use and a bit of surprise that it is here, on my counter, looking out the window over a snowy Brooklyn morning.)
Patterns and the Hymn of Hygeia
So what does this all have to do with Hygeia? Well, to get the full skinny you’ll need to attend the Live Chat (or watch the recording when I upload it). But here are some tantalizing tidbits:
Hygeia is called “Mother of Everything” and also “Mother of the All” — a pretty impressive title, and also an important one for understanding how She shows up in everyday life, as well as in Orphic cosmology.
Hygeia manifests Herself in the cosmos through the fractal patterning that is inseparable from Life itself. Without harmonious patterning, life tends to either grow chaotically and overabundantly in unhelpful places, or on the contrary, to suffer from a lack of structure that causes a failure to thrive.
Hygeia is not just responsible for banishing sickness, but is also the source of flourishing home life, including the pattern-based arts and crafts that sustain the home and those who live in it.
Hygeia has an important role to play in Mystery Rites, particularly in her role of “Eternal Defender” against disruptive or imbalanced patterns that lead to physical decay and death.
The Hymn of Hygeia is one of the most explicitly magical hymns in the collection — or at least, one of the hymns that, when read esoterically, seems to offer us a window into the specific “magical” or theurgic rites of the Orphic Mysteries.
Reading this hymn closely, in light of ancient number theory, helps shed light on just how influential the Orphics were for other movements — from the Pythagoreans, to Plato and later Platonic philosophy, to Hellenistic astrology, Renaissance magic, and beyond.
Health as Attunement to Cosmic Patterns
As a disabled person, I find it particularly inspiring that the Orphic idea of health is not dependent on “getting better,” which is something out of reach for many of us struggling with chronic illness or disability. Of course, the possibility of physical recovery is available for those to whom it is accessible, but Hygeia can work on and in us whether or not we are able to physically “get well.”
Calling on Hygeia, is, rather, a practice of attunement to the All that is available to anyone, any time.
This bears repeating: Health is not the state of perfect individual embodiment. It is not a Youtube health bro’s “optimizing food regimen” to achieve “peak performance.”
Health is a dynamic process of tapping into a collective pattern of balance, which is itself always moving and growing and morphing into new life ways.
By listening to and aligning with the (collective) All, we can achieve a sense of spiritual wellness that is not dependent on our individual body “getting well soon.”
How many times have you been feeling out of whack, and are restored by watching the rain or snow tap on your window?
How many times has your cat’s purr or your dog’s snuffled breath brought you into the present moment and subtly realigned your own breathing?
How many times have you gazed at the stars and felt both enormous and tiny and grounded and floating all at the same time?
Or felt the steadying, no-nonsense touch of the nurse’s hand as they guide you out of the hospital bed and towards the restroom?
Those are all moments when cosmic patterning is working on and through us to encourage our alignment with Hygeia.
And moments like these are available to us all regardless of the particular form our body takes at any given moment.
So whether you want to cultivate a relationship to Hygeia for your own (or a loved one’s) health, or you want to better understand ancient magic, or form a deeper relationship to the cosmos, or any and all of the above, Hygeia is a hymn you should 100% engage with.
So without further ado, here it is. (And don’t forget about the link at the bottom of this post for the Live Chat this Sunday, Jan 12th, 2025 at 2pm.)
In the service of Earth and Starry Sky,
Kristin
