In the solitude of the primordial world, the affairs of the gods took place on an empty stage, with no watching eyes to mirror them.
There was a rustling, but no clamor of voices. Then, from a certain point on (but at what point? and why?), the backdrop began to flicker,
the air was invaded by a golden sprinkling of new beings, the shrill, high-pitched cry of scores of raised voices. Dactyls, Curetes, Corybants, Telchines, Silens, Cabiri, Satyrs, Maenads, Bacchants, Lenaeans, Thyiads, Bassarides, Mimallones, Naiads, Nymphs, Titires:
who were all these beings? To evoke one of their names is to evoke them all. They are the helpers, ministers, guardians, nurses, tutors, and spectators of the gods. The metamorphic vortex is placated; once surrounded by this noisy and devoted crowd, the gods agree
to settle down into their familiar forms. Sometimes that crowd will appear as a pack of murderers, sometimes as an assembly of craftsmen, sometimes as a dance troupe, sometimes as a herd of beasts

That worshiping crowd was the first community, the first group, the first entity in which one name was used for everybody. We don't even know whether they are gods, daimones, or human beings. But what is it that unites them, what makes them a single group, even when different and distant from one another? They are the initiated, the ones who who have seen. They are those who let themselves be touched by the divine. Which of them came first? We don't know, since for every god there is always a corresponding god or goddess - in Asia, in Thrace, in Crete - who predates them and who likewise surrounds himself with such beings. But of all of them we could say that they were honey thieves.

(from Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)