many ancient authors quoted from these texts, thus preserving some of their most important content. Various collections of Orphic texts and fragments have been published: the massive Orphica of Gottfried Hermann, 1805, which included the entire Orphic Argonautica and all the Orphic hymns, as well as a collection of fragments; there is the shorter Orphica of Eugenius Abel, 1885, and there were others, mostly shorter collections. In 1922 a renowned collection of fragments was published by the philologist Otto Kern in his book Orphicorum Fragmenta [1]; this book has been the main source of the Orphic fragments since its publication. Kern concentrated purely on the fragments, leaving the Argonautica and the Orphic Hymns alone, for the most part. To anyone other than specialized scholars, this work is completely inaccessible, because its contents are in the original languages, ancient Greek and Latin. Any commentary and notes are found in Latin, as is the convention of scholars. There is no existing translation of the book into English, except for an impossibly abbreviated collection of fragments which can be accessed online; this same collection is found in Orpheus and Greek Religion by W. K. C. Guthrie [2]. There are also some lengthy passages in English of fragments found in translations of the early Church Fathers. Also, some translations can be found in commentaries by various Neoplatonic philosophers, mostly Proclus.
