Prayer to the Korybantes

A modern LABRYS text (see greek-agathodaimon-001), taken from the Orphic hymn to the Korybas — and in the singular, as in the original, though the deities field names the Korybantes in the plural.

This hymn is one of the obscurest in the collection. "The bloodied, blood-drenched brother" is a muffled reference to a story that is not retold: there were three Korybantes, and two killed the third. The Orphic text points at the murder with a single epithet and moves on; for an initiate that is enough, and an outsider will not be told.

And the rite is one of purification, and the choice of deity here is neither casual nor careless. Corybantic ecstasies were a recognised form of treatment in antiquity: korybantiasmos, frenzied dancing to a din, was applied in cases of terror and derangement, and Plato speaks of it. To be "corybantized" was to be treated.

Hence the request: "scatter evil fears", "helper of imagination". The compilers have kept for the deity precisely the work it used to do — the cure of terror by means of terror itself, put in order and turned into a dance.

"Changed his pure body, taking on the form of beast and serpent" — a transformation usual for an Orphic god; compare the bull-faced Dionysus torn apart by the Titans (orphic-dionysus-001).