The Kouretes

The Kouretes were the armed youths who, clashing their shields and spears in a wild dance, drowned out the cries of the infant Zeus on Crete, so that his father Kronos should not hear and devour him. Divine guardians and dancers, they are closely akin to the Corybantes, the frenzied attendants of the Mother of the Gods, with whom the Orphic hymns join them.

Their ecstatic, armoured dance made them patrons of initiation and of the divine madness of the mysteries — to be 'corybantic' was to be seized and possessed by the god. They guard the divine child as the soul itself must be guarded in its first perilous descent into the world.