CURETES
art
<<Homer, in the Iliad, mentions the *CURETES* as a legendary people
who took part in the quarrel over the Calydonian Boar. Strabo
mentioned that the *CURETES* were assigned multiple identities and
places of origin. Dionysius of Halicarnassus mentioned the *CURETES*
as the old name of the Aetolians.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhea_(mythology)
<<The original seat of Rhea worship was in Crete. There, according to
myth, she saved the new-born Zeus, her sixth child, from being
devoured by Kronos, by substituting a stone for the infant god and
entrusting him to the care of her attendants the **CURETES** . These
attendants afterwards became the bodyguard of Zeus and the priests of
Rhea, and performed ceremonies in her honor. In historic times, the
resemblances between Rhea and the Asiatic Great Mother, Phrygian
Cybele, a manifestation of the Great Goddess, were so noticeable that
the Greeks accounted for them by regarding the latter as their own
Rhea, who had deserted her original home in Crete and fled to the
mountain wilds of Asia Minor to escape the persecution of Kronos. It
is probably true that cultural contacts with the mainland brought to
Crete the worship of the Asiatic Great Mother, who became the Cretan
Rhea.
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http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Kouretes.html
<<THE KOURETES DAKTYLOI (or *CURETES* and Dactyls) were three, five,
or nine rustic Daimones (Spirits) appointed by Rhea to guard the
infant god Zeus in a cave on Mount Ida in Krete. In order to keep him
safely hidden from his cannibalistic father, the Titan Kronos, they
drowned out his cries with a frenzied dance of clashing spear and
shield. The Kouretes were gods of the wild mountainside, inventors of
the rustic arts of metalworking, shepherding, hunting & beekeeping.
They were also the first armed warriors, and gods of the orgiastic war
dance performed by the youths of Krete and Euboia.>>
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http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/*CURETES*
*CURETES* (Gr. Kouprms and Kovpnms). (I) A legendary people mentioned
by Homer (Il. ix. 529 ff.) as taking part in the quarrel over the
Calydonian boar. They were identified in antiquity as either Aetolians
or Acarnanians (Strabo 462, 26), and were also represented by a stock
in Chalcis in Euboea. (2) In mythology (unconnected with the above),
the attendants of Rhea. The story went that they saved the infant Zeus
from his father Cronus in Crete by surrounding his cradle and with
clashing of sword and shield preventing his cries from being heard,
and thus became the body-guard of the god and the first priests of
Zeus and Rhea. In historic times the cult of the *CURETES* was widely
known in Greece in connexion with that of Rhea (q.v.). Its ceremonies
consisted principally in the performance of the Pyrrhic dance to the
accompaniment of hymns and flute music, by the priests, who
represented and thus commemorated the original act of the *CURETES*
themselves. The dance was originally distinguished from that of the
Corybantes by its comparative moderation, and took on the full
character of the latter only after the cult of the Great Mother,
Cybele, to which it belonged, spread to Greek soil. The origin of the
dance may have lain in the supposed efficacy of noise in averting
evil.
The *CURETES* are represented in art with shield and sword performing
the sacred dance about the infant Zeus, sometimes in the presence of a
female figure which may be Rhea. Their number in art is usually two or
three, but in literature is sometimes as high as ten. Of their names
the following have survived: Kures, Kres, Biennos, Eleuther, Itanos,
Labrandos, Panamoros, Palaxos; but no complete list of names is
possible because of their confusion with the names of the Corybantes
and other like deities. Their origin is variously related: they were
earthborn, sprung of the rain, sons of Zeus and Hera, sons of Apollo
and Danais, sons of Rhea, of the Dactyli, contemporary with the Titans
(Diod. Sic. v. 66). Rationalism made them the mortal sons of a mortal
Zeus, or originators of the Pyrrhic dance, inventors of weapons,
fosterers of agriculture, regulators of social life, &c. A plausible
theory is that of Georg Kaibel (GOttinger Nachrichten, 1901, pp.
512-514), who sees in them, together with the Corybantes, Cabeiri,
Dactyli, Telchines, Titans, &c., only the same beings under different
names at different times and in different places. Kaibel holds that
they all had a phallic significance, having once been great primitive
deities of procreation, and that having fallen to an indistinct,
subordinate position in the course of the development and
formalization of Greek religion, they survive in historic times only
as half divine, half demonic beings, worshipped in connexion with the
various forms of the great nature goddess. The resemblances,
especially between Rhea and her *CURETES* and the Great Mother and her
Corybantes (q.v.), were so striking that their origins were
inextricably confused even in the minds of the ancients: e.g.
Demetrius of Scepsis (Strabo 469, 12) derives the *CURETES* and Rhea
from the cult of the Great Mother in Asia, while Virgil (Aen. iii. 11
1) looks upon the latter and the Corybantes as derivations from the
former. The worship of both was akin in nature to that of the Dactyli,
the Cabeiri, and even of Dionysus, the special visible bond being the
orgiastic character of their rites.
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Art Neuendorffer