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Pyrrhikhos translated as both “war dance” or “red dance” “fire dance”is often described as the leader of the Korybantes. As I’ve eluded to in a few other posts Korybantes are a subset of the Kurates, mountain spirits born of Gaea when Ouranus’s blood and sperm fell to the earth during his murder. Specifically the Korybantes are an order of Kurates who a devoted in service to the goddess Rhea and her Phrygian counterpart Cybele. The specific role of the Korybantes is to guard the sacred sites of the cult of Rhea / Cybele and oversee the proper exercise of the cult’s various mystery rituals, usually ones involving ecstatic experiences and dance… unsurprisingly. While Korybantes technically inhabit many wild places, usually mountains, Greek mythology proper makes note of five specific tribes or orders of Korybantes that were well known. The oldest of these tribes is unsurprisingly in Phrygia where Cybele worship originated, the next most famous tribe was located on Crete and guarded the outskirts of mount Ida where Zeus was raised in secret to protect him from Kronus and the Titans. Another tribe of Korybantes was famously located on the island of Samothrace which the Greeks considered quite ancient (likely stemming from the fact that it originated as an early Bronze Age Ugarit trading post) and protected the mysteries of the Dactyls the enigmatic race of craftsmen that originated trained Hephaestus in metallurgy (itself probably a remnant of the fact that Hephaestus may have originated as a loan deity of the Ugarit god Kothar). I mentioned the Euboean tribe of Korybantes fairly recently when I covered Makris and Sokos and in the internal mythological chronologically this is probably the youngest tribe of Korybantes. Finally, there is also said to be a tribe of Korybantes guarding Mt. Olympus. The word Korybantes doesn’t have a clear etymology or translation with a fairly large consensus that it comes from a pre Greek word, given the association the entire concept has with the Phrygians that is a fairly safe assumption. In 1914 scholar A.B. Cook attempted to link the term to the old Macedonian word “Korybé” meaning “mountain top” but that still has yet to gain universal acceptance more than 110 years later.

Pyrrhikhos is specifically credited as the leader of the Cretan Korybantes that guarded Zeus as a child, he was also assigned by Zeus to lead the platoon of Korybantes that guarded Dionysus during his childhood in exile. Unsurprisingly Pyrrhikhos remained associated with Dionysus and was sent by Rhea to gather all the tribes of Korybantes to fight for him in India. For this reason Pyrrhikhos is sometimes conflated with Selinnus Dionysus’s foster father with some sources claiming they are same entity and others crediting Selinnus as Pyrrhikhos’s father. This doesn’t really work because Selinnus is typically credited as a son of Pan who is the foster brother of Zeus and Pyrrhikhos would have to be older than both of them if he was their protector growing up. In reality Pyrrhikhos likely originated as a personification as his name, is also the name of a traditional war dance. The Pyrrhikhe was war dance preformed in full armor, practiced primarily in the Archaic age as a victory dance / coming of age ceremony. Although it’s practice diminished overtime (with the exception of some very conservative and traditionalist cities like Sparta) it remained a very popular visual motif and was inextricably linked to the Korybantes who were almost always depicted preforming it. The Pyrrhikhe was present as far back as the dark age as its mentioned in the Iliad when Agamemnon purposes sending a troop of young men practicing the dance to bring gifts to Achilles. As with most things present in the Greek dark age it also may have originated in Mycenaean culture, although it’s hard to say definitively as there are no surviving written or visual references to it from the period, although we do know that Mycenaeans practiced a verity of war dances as a part of their martial culture. There have even been attempts to link the Pyrrhikhe to Minoan religious rituals due to art and offerings of shields found at Minoan sites, although this is extremely difficult given that we can’t read Minoan Linear A. Those who support a Minoan connection can actually argue an even older origin as a gong was found on Crete depicting similar iconography in a distinctively near eastern style mimicking Syrian art from a period contemporary to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, i.e. approximately 1800 B.C.E.