Korybantes
The Korybantes, called the Kurbantes in (Phrygia), are the crested dancers who worship the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing. Their wild ecstatic cult can be compared to the female Maenads who followed Dionysus. Ovid says they were born from rainwater, which might connect them with the Pelasgian Hyades.The Phrygian Korybantes were often confused with other ecstatic male confraternities, such as the Idaean Dactyls or the Cretan Kouretes, who acted as guardians of the infant Zeus. In the Greek telling of Zeus' birth, the Kouretes' ritual clashing spears and shields were interpreted as intended to drown out the infant god's cries, and prevent his discovery by his father Cronus.
The French classicist H. Jeanmaire has convincingly shown that both the Kouretes and Cretan Zeus (called "the greatest kouros" in Cretan hymns) were intimately connected with the transition of young men (kouroi) into manhood in Cretan cities.
Korybantes or Kouretes presided over the infancy of Dionysus, another god who was born as a babe, and of Zagreus, a Cretan child of Zeus.
Although the Greek imagination tends to portray the Korybantes as mythical and virile, they may be modeled on the real world transsexual followers of Cybele in Phrygia, known at Rome as galli; the Greek construction of gender would have tended to suppress these links.
Alternatives: Corybants (older English texts), Koryvandes (modern Greek transliteration).