Bastet

Bastet is the ancient Egyptian goddess of the home, of women, of fertility and of protection, and above all the goddess whose cult centre was the Delta city of Bubastis. Her history runs from ferocity toward gentleness. In her earliest form she was a lioness, a fierce solar goddess barely distinguishable from Sekhmet, and like Sekhmet she was called a daughter of the sun god Ra and one of his defenders, turning her savagery against his enemy, the serpent Apophis, who threatened to swallow the sun. Over the centuries her image softened: from about the first millennium BCE she is shown as a domestic cat or a cat-headed woman, keeping her protective power but exchanging the lioness's open menace for the cat's watchful poise. The cat itself, valued for guarding grain-stores against vermin and prized in Egyptian households, became her sacred animal.

Bastet's name is attested as early as the Second Dynasty, inscribed on stone vessels found at Saqqara and dated to around the twenty-ninth century BCE, making her cult, in some form, one of the oldest continuously documented in Egyptian religion, already active centuries before the pyramids of Giza were built and long before her later, better-known cat-headed form had developed.

The worship of Bastet at Bubastis was among the most joyous in Egypt. The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited, describes an annual festival drawing enormous crowds by barge along the Nile, with music, dancing and a great deal of wine, one of the most exuberant religious gatherings he had seen. Excavation of the site has revealed vast cemeteries of mummified cats, buried as offerings to the goddess and bred in their thousands for the purpose, a striking measure of the scale of her cult. As a household goddess Bastet protected women in pregnancy and childbirth and guarded the family and its home, and amulets in her image were worn for that protection. She holds together, in the single figure of the cat, the two Egyptian intuitions about that animal: the affectionate guardian of the hearth, and the coiled hunter descended from the desert lioness who defends the sun.

The reverence attached to Bastet's sacred animal could carry real legal consequences even under foreign rule. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, visiting Egypt in the first century BCE, reports that a Roman citizen who accidentally killed a cat was set upon and killed by an angry Egyptian crowd despite the diplomatic risk of harming a Roman, and that neither King Ptolemy nor the fear of Rome's power could save him, a story Diodorus offers as proof of just how deeply the protection of cats, and by extension Bastet's cult, remained embedded in Egyptian popular feeling even under Ptolemaic and early Roman administration.