Tethys receives a rare direct address in one of the few surviving texts that treats her as something closer to an object of devotion rather than only a genealogical entry: the collection known as the Orphic Hymns, a set of eighty seven short hymns composed probably in Asia Minor around the second or third century CE for use in a private religious association rather than any public civic cult. Hymn twenty two of the collection calls on Tethys directly as the source and nurse of all waters, praising her as the goddess who feeds the rivers, the sea and the springs and asking her favor in language that treats her as a living, approachable power rather than the inert cosmological ancestor she remains in Hesiod's much earlier Theogony. The Orphic Hymns as a whole are thought to have functioned within a specific, closed devotional group, their exact ritual use not fully recoverable, and they preserve Tethys, along with a number of other archaic and otherwise cult-less figures, as objects of hymnic address centuries after her Hesiodic role had become purely genealogical scaffolding for a much wider Greek audience.
The gap between the Theogony's Tethys, a name in a divine family tree with no cult of her own, and the Orphic Hymns' Tethys, a goddess personally invoked for favor, illustrates how differently the same ancient figure could function depending on the specific religious and literary context that preserved her, public cosmogonic poetry in one case, a smaller and more devotional circle in the other, separated by perhaps a thousand years and considerable change in Greek religious sensibility.