Prayer to the Kouretes
the KouretesA modern LABRYS text (see greek-agathodaimon-001) from the Orphic hymn to the Kouretes, and it stands in the same purificatory rite as the preceding one (greek-koryvantes-001).
"Bronze-clashing" — chalkokrotoi, and the whole myth is in that word. The Kouretes danced in armour around the infant Zeus in the Cretan cave, beating their weapons on their shields to drown his crying, so that Kronos should not hear and swallow his son. Their business is to make a noise behind which the vulnerable cannot be heard.
Hence their fitness in a purification. Beating bronze was an apotropaic technique, and not only among Greeks: at the Roman Lemuria the head of the household struck bronze of Temesa nine times, showing the dead out of the house (lares-006). Sound drives off what a word cannot reach — the notion is older than either religion.
"Celestial, terrestrial and aquatic" is the familiar covering formula: three tiers, so that none is left untouched.
"Nurses of souls" — psychotrophoi. The nursemaids of the infant Zeus are promoted to feeders of every soul; the Orphic collection does this constantly, raising particular mythological figures to cosmic powers.