Corybantes
The Corybantes were Rhea's enthusiastic priests, who with drums, cymbals, horns, and in full armour, performed their orgiastic dances in the forests and on the mountains of Phrygia.
In all European countries Rhea was conceived to be accompanied by the Curetes, who are inseparably connected with the birth and bringing up of Zeus in Crete, and in Phrygia by the Corybantes, Atys, and Agdistis.
From Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and MythologyFrom Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D.
Fig. 13: A military dance, supposed to be the Corybantum. From a Greek bas-relief in the Vatican Museum.
Of the second class, the gymnastic, the most important were military dances, the invention of which was attributed to Minerva; of these the Corybantum was the most remarkable. It was of Phrygian origin and of a mixed religious, military, and mimetic character; the performers were armed, and bounded about, springing and clashing their arms and shields to imitate the Corybantes endeavouring to stifle the cries of the infant Zeus, in Crete. The Pyrrhic (fig. 13), a war dance of Doric origin, was a rapid dance to the double flute, and made to resemble an action in battle; the Hoplites of Homer is thought to have been of this kind. The Dorians were very partial to this dance and considered their success in battle due to the celerity and training of the dance. In subsequent periods it was imitated by female dancers and as a pas seul. It was also performed in the Panathenaea by Ephebi at the expense of the Choragus, but this was probably only a mimetic performance and not warlike.
From The Hymns of Orpheus
XXXVII. TO THE CURETES
The FUMIGATION from FRANKINCENSE.
Brass-beating Salians, ministers of Mars,
Who guard his arms the instruments of warsWhose blessed frames, heav'n, earth, and sea compose,
And from whose breath all animals arose:
Who dwell in Samothracia's sacred ground,
Defending mortals thro' the sea profound.
Deathless Curetes, by your pow'r alone,
Initial rites to men at first were shewn:
Who shake old Ocean thund'ring to the sky,
And stubborn oaks with branches waving high.
'Tis your's in glittering arms the earth to beat,
With lightly-leaping, rapid, sounding feet;
Then every beast the noise terrific flies,
And the loud tumult wanders thro' the skies:
The dust your feet excites with matchless force,
Flies to the clouds amidst their whirling course;
And ev'ry flower of variegated hue,
Grows in the dancing motion form'd by you.
Immortal dæmons, to your pow'rs consign'd
The talk to nourish, and destroy mankind.When rushing furious with loud tumult dire,
O'erwhelm'd, they perish in your dreadful ire;
And live replenish'd with the balmy air,
The food of life, committed to your care.
When shook by you, the seas, with wild uproar,
Wide-spreading, and profoundly whirling, roar:
The concave heav'ns, with Echo's voice resound,
When leaves with ruffling noise bestrew the ground.
Curetes, Corybantes, ruling kings,
Whose praise the land of Samothracia sings:
From Jove descended; whose immortal breath
Sustains the soul, and wafts her back from death;
Aerial-form'd, much-fam'd, in heav'n ye shine
Two-fold, in heav'n all-lucid and divine:
Blowing, serene, from whom abundance springs,
Nurses of seasons, fruit-producing kings.
From Works, Volume Two by Lucian of Samosata
The first step, we learn, was taken by Rhea, who was so pleased with the art that she introduced it among the Corybantes in Phrygia and the Curetes in Crete. She was richly rewarded: for by their dancing they saved her child Zeus, who owes it to them (nor can he with decency deny it) that he escaped the paternal teeth. The dancing was performed in full armour; sword clashed against shield, and inspired heels beat martial time upon the ground. The art was presently taken up by the leading men in Crete, who by dint of practice became admirable dancers; and this applies not only to private persons, but to men of the first eminence, and of royal blood. Thus Homer, when he calls Meriones a dancer, is not disparaging him, but paying him a compliment: his dancing fame, it seems, had spread not only throughout the Greek world, but even into the camp of his enemies, the Trojans, who would observe, no doubt, on the field of battle that agility and grace of movement which he had acquired as a dancer.
From Analysis of Ancient Mythology. Volume II
As the Cyclopians were great artists, they probably were famous for works in brass, and iron: and that circumstance in their history may have been founded in truth. The Idæi Dactyli were Cyclopians: and they are said to have first forged metals, and to have reduced them to common use; the knowledge of which art they obtained from the fusion of minerals at the burning of mount Ida. Whether this was an eruption of fire from the internal part of the mountain, or only a fire kindled among the forests, which crowned its summit, cannot be determined. It was an event of antient date; and admitted, as a remarkable epocha, in the most early series of chronology. From this event the Curetes, and Corybantes, who were the same as the Idæi Dactyli, are supposed to have learned the mystery of fusing and forging metals. From them it was propagated to many countries westward, particularly to the Pangæan mountains, and the region Curetis, where the Cyclopians dwelt in Thrace: also to the region Trinacia and Leontina, near Ætna, which they occupied in Sicily.
From Religious Cults Associated With the Amazons By Florence Mary Bennett
One story told that Scamander introduced the rites of the Cretan Mother into Phrygia, and that they were firmly established at Pessinus on the Sangarius as a chief centre, where the goddess received from the mountain ridge overhanging the city the well-known name, Dindymene; another account had it that the home of Phrygian Cybele's worship was in Samothrace, whence Dardanus brought the cult to Phrygia; an attempt to rationalise the two legends developed the tale that Corybas of Samothrace, son of Demeter and Jasion, introduced the rites of his mother into Phrygia, and that his successors, the Corybantes of Mount Ida in the Troad, passed over to the Cretan mountain of the same name, in order to educate the infant Zeus. In the minds of the various writers of antiquity to whom we are indebted for all that we know about orgiastic cults there is such confusion that we are left in ignorance of accurate details which would serve to distinguish sharply one cult from another.
From Apollodorus I
Thalia had by Apollo the Corybantes, and Melpo- mene had by Achelous the Sirens, of whom we shall speak in treating of Ulysses.
From The Mithraic Liturgy, Clergy and Devotees
Nevertheless, it must not be supposed that Mithraism exhibited nothing more than the benignant phantasmagoria of a species of ancient freemasonry. There had subsisted in its liturgic drama vestiges of its original barbarism, of the time when in the forests, in the depths of some dark cave, corybantes, enveloped in the skins of beasts, sprinkled the altars with their blood. In the Roman towns, the secluded caverns of the mountains were replaced by subterranean vaults (spelæa) of far less imposing aspect. But even in these artificial grottos the scenes of initiation were calculated to produce on the neophyte a profound impression. When, after having traversed the approaches of the temple, he descended the stairs of the crypt, he perceived before him in the brilliantly decorated and illuminated sanctuary the venerated image of the tauroctonous Mithra erected in the apse, then the monstrous statues of the leontocephalous Kronos, laden with attributes and mystic symbols, the meaning of which was still unknown to him. At the two sides, partly in the shadow, the assistants, kneeling on stone benches, were seen praying. Lamps ranged about the choir threw their bright rays on the images of the gods and the celebrants, who, robed in strange costumes, received the new convert. Fitful flashes of light skillfully manipulated impressed his eyes and his mind. The sacred emotion with which he was seized, lent to images which were really puerile: a most formidable appearance; the vain allurements with which he was confronted appeared to him serious dangers over which his courage triumphed. The fermented beverage which he imbibed excited his senses and disturbed his reason to the utmost pitch; he murmured his mystic formulas, and they evoked before his distracted imagination divine apparitions. In his ecstasy, he believed himself transported beyond the limits of the world, and having issued from his trance he repeated, as did the mystic of Apuleius: "I have transcended the boundaries of death, I have trodden the threshold of Proserpine, and having traversed all the elements I am returned to the earth. In the middle of the night I have seen the Sun scintillating with a pure light; I have approached the gods below and the gods above, and have worshipped them face to face."
From Dialogues of Plato. Laws
Athenian. Let us assume, then, as a first principle in relation both to the body and soul of very young creatures, that nursing and moving about by day and night is good for them all, and that the younger they are, the more they will need it; infants should live, if that were possible, as if they were always rocking at sea. This is the lesson which we may gather from the experience of nurses, and likewise from the use of the remedy of motion in the rites of the Corybantes; for when mothers want their restless children to go to sleep they do not employ rest, but, on the contrary, motion—rocking them in their arms; nor do they give them silence, but they sing to them and lap them in sweet strains; and the Bacchic women are cured of their frenzy in the same manner by the use of the dance and of music.
From Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions by James Bonwick
Higgins, in Celtic Druids, will have Culdees only changed Druids, and regarded the Irish hereditary Abbots of Iona, the Coarbs or Curbs, as simply Corybantes. Latin writers knew them as Colidei or God-worshippers. Bishop Nicholson thought them Cool Dubh, from their black hoods. As C and G are commutable letters in Irish, we have Giolla De, Servant of God. The word Culdee was used by Boece in 1526. Dr. Reeves, in the Irish Academy, calls the Servus Dei by the Celtic Celi-Dé, and notes the name Ceile-n-De applied to the Sligo Friars in the Four Masters, 1595. Monks were reputed Keledei in the thirteenth century. Brockham's Lexicon finds regulars and seculars called so in the ninth century.
