Korybantes

According to the Greek mythology, the Korybantes (/ˌkɒrɪˈbæntiːz/; Greek: Κορύβαντες) were the armed and crested dancers who
worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing. They are also called the Kurbantes in Phrygia. The
conventional English equivalent is "Corybants". The Korybantes were the offspring of Thalia and Apollo.

Contents
Etymology
Counterparts
Initiatory dance
Ecstatics
Other functions
Notes
References
External links

Etymology
. Edzard Johan Furnée andR. S. P. Beekes have suggested a Pre-Greek origin.[1][2]
The name Korybantes is of uncertain etymology

Others refer the name to *κορυβή (korybé), the Macedonian version of κορυφή (koryphé) "crown, top, mountain peak", explaining
their association with mountains, particularlyOlympus.[3]

Counterparts
The Kuretes or Kouretes (Κουρῆτες) were nine dancers who venerate Rhea, the Cretan counterpart of Cybele. A fragment from
Strabo's Book VII[4] gives a sense of the roughly analogous character of these male confraternities, and the confusion rampant among
those not initiated:

Many assert that the gods worshipped in Samothraceas well as the Kurbantes and the Korybantes and in like manner
the Kouretes and the Idaean Daktyls are the same as the Kabeiroi, but as to the Kabeiroi they are unable to tell who
they are.

Initiatory dance
These armored male dancers kept time to a drum and the rhythmic stamping of their feet. Dance, according to Greek thought, was
one of the civilizing activities, like wine-making or music. The dance in armor (the "Pyrrhic dance" or pyrrhichios [Πυρρίχη]) was a
male coming-of-age initiation ritual linked to a warrior victory celebration. Both Jane Ellen Harrison and the French classicist Henri
Jeanmaire[6] have shown that both the Kouretes (Κουρῆτες) and Cretan Zeus, who was called "the greatest kouros (κοῦρος)",[7] were
intimately connected with the transition of boys into manhood in Cretan cities.

The English "Pyrrhic Dance" is a corruption of the original Pyrríkhē or the Pyrríkhios Khorós "Pyrrhichian Dance". It has no
relationship with the king Pyrrhus of Epirus, who invaded Italy in the 3rd century BC, and who gave his name to the Pyrrhic victory,
which was achieved at such cost that it was tantamount to a defeat.

A decorous Corybantian dance, as
pictured in William Smith's A
Dictionary of Greek and Roman
Antiquities [5] (1870).
Ecstatics
The Phrygian Korybantes were often confused by Greeks with other ecstatic male
confraternities, such as the Idaean Dactyls or the Cretan Kouretes, spirit-youths
(kouroi) who acted as guardians of the infant Zeus. In Hesiod's telling of Zeus's
birth,[8] when Great Gaia came to Crete and hid the child Zeus in a "steep cave",
beneath the secret places of the earth, on Mount Aigaion with its thick forests; there
the Cretan Kouretes' ritual clashing spears and shields were interpreted by Hellenes
as intended to drown out the infant god's cries, and prevent his discovery by his
cannibal father Cronus. Emily Vermeule observed,

This myth is Greek interpretation of mystifying Minoan ritual in an attempt to reconcile their Father Zeus with the
Divine Child of Crete; the ritual itself we may never recover with clarity, but it is not impossible that a connection
Arkalochori".[9]
exists between the Kouretes' weapons at the cave and the dedicated weapons at

Among the offerings recovered from the cave, the most spectacular are decorated bronze shields with patterns that draw upon north
[10]
Syrian originals and a bronzegong on which a god and his attendants are shown in a distinctly Near Eastern style.

Korybantes also presided over the infancy of Dionysus, another god who was born as a babe, and of Zagreus, a Cretan child of Zeus,
or child-doublet of Zeus. The wild ecstasy of their cult can be compared to the female
Maenads who followed Dionysus.

Ovid, in Metamorphoses, says the Kouretes were born from rainwater (Uranus fertilizing Gaia). This suggests a connexion with the
Pelasgian Hyades.

Other functions
The scholar Jane Ellen Harrison writes that besides being guardians, nurturers, and
initiators of the infant Zeus, the Kouretes were primitive magicians and seers. She
also writes that they were metal workers and that metallurgy was considered an
almost magical art.[11] There were several "tribes" of Korybantes, including the
Cabeiri, the Korybantes Euboioi, the Korybantes Samothrakioi. Hoplodamos and
his Gigantes were counted among Korybantes, and Titan Anytos was considered a
Kourete. The Kouretes dancing around the
infant Zeus, as pictured in Themis by
Homer referred to select young men as kouretes, when Agamemnon instructs Jane Ellen Harrison (1912, p. 23; see
Odysseus to pick out kouretes, the bravest among the Achaeans to bear gifts to References section below).
Achilles.[12] The Greeks preserved a tradition down to Strabo's day, that the
Kuretes of Aetolia and Acarnania in mainland Greece had been imported from
Crete.[13]

Notes
1. Edzard Johan Furnée,Die wichtigsten konsonantischen Erscheinungen des V
orgriechischen mit einem Appendix
über den Vokalismus, 1972, p. 359.
2. R. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, p. 755.
3. * A. B. Cook (1914), Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, Vol. I, p. 107, Cambridge University Press
 4. Quoted by Jane Ellen Harrison, "The Kouretes and Zeus Kouros: A Study in Pre-Historic Sociology",The Annual of
the British School at Athens15 (1908/1909:308-338) p. 309; Harrison observes that Strabo's not very illuminating
statement serves to show "that in Strabo's time even a learned man was in complete doubt as to the exact nature of
the Kouretes" and second, "that in current opinion,Satyrs, Kouretes, Idaean Daktyls, Korybantes and Kabeiroi
appeared as figures roughly analogous".
5. Smith, Dictionary, s.v. "Saltatio".
6. Harrison 1908/09; Jeanmaire,Couroi et Courètes: essai sur l'éducation spartiate et sur les rites d'adolescence dans
l'antiquité hellénique, Lille, 1939).
7. At Palaikastro the inscribed "hymn of the Kouretes" dates to ca. 300 BCE.
8. Hesiod, Theogony 478-91.
9. Vermeule, "A Gold Minoan Double Axe"Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts57 No. 307 (1959:4-16) p. 6.
10. G.L. Hoffman, Imports and Immigrants: Near Eastern Contacts with Early Iron Age Crete , 1997, noted by Robin Lane
Fox, Travelling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer, 2008:157; "A bronze tympanum, several cymbals, and sixty-odd
shields, many finely decorated, evoke the dance of the Curetes, which is also depicted on the tympanum, even if the
bearded god and his attendants are rendered in Oriental style", observes Noel Robertson, "The ancient Mother of
the Gods. A missing chapter in the history of Greek religion", in Eugene Lane, ed.
Cybele, Attis and Related Cults:
Essays in Memory of M.J. Vermaseren 1996:248 and noted sources.
11. Harrison, Chapter I: The Hymn of the Kouretes, p. 1 and 26. On page 26, specifically , she writes: "The Kouretes are
also, as all primitive magicians are, seers μαντεις).
( When Minos in Crete lost his son Glaukos he sent for the
Kouretes to discover where the child was hidden. Closely akin to this magical aspect is the fact that they are metal-
workers. Among primitive people metallurgy is an uncanny craft and the smith is half medicine man."
12. Homer, Iliad xix.193.
13. Strabo, x.462, quoted in Harrison 1908/09.309 note 4.

References
Jane Ellen Harrison. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion
. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1912. (The University of Chicago, EOS -Themis, p. 1) (The University of Chicago, EOS -Themis p. 26.)

External links
Media related to Korybantes at Wikimedia Commons
Theoi Project - Korybantes and Kouretes
Long review (in English) of Paola Ceccarelli,La pirrica nell' antichità greco romana: Studi sulla danza armata,1998

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