Lee.Fly
my little sun god
Lore of the Cat
A Mystical History of Catdom
"Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; thou art indeed...the Great Cat." ~ Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes
The White Cat
Most people who readily admit that they "adore" cats would be shocked if one took them literally. The cat has, however, a disdainful aloofness, a quality of meditativeness and inscrutability which has often been mistaken for divinity.
The Deity: The only fully developed cult of the cat existed in Egypt and it lasted over two thousand years. No one knows when the Egyptian cat was first sanctified, and it was never officially considered to be divine. But such a distinction was too subtle for the general public, and Egyptian art provides ample evidence that the Egyptians treated these sacred animals as gods.
The cat was considered very early on to be sacred to the Egyptian goddess Isis. It gradually came to be recognized as an incarnation of deity, and it was as the daughter of Isis and her husband, the sun god Osiris, that the great cat goddess Bastest (Bast or Pasht) emerged. Egyptian gods and goddesses have a confusing way of merging into one another, and it is important to remember this in considering myth and ritual with which Bastet is connected. For instance Osiris, Horus, Ra and Ptah were all different forms of the sun god. Isis merged with Hathor, the cow goddess, and with Mut, the Theban mother goddess. Osiris, Bastet's father, was not only a sun god but also a moon god and god of the underworld; while Isis, her mother, was a sun/moon/earth goddess. The worship of Bastet overlapped that of Isis, Hathor and Mut, and also that of the lion goddesses, Tefnut and Sekhmet, according to the district and to which of Bastet's many aspects were being stressed. The cat goddess had a solar son, Nefertem, by the sun god, Amen-Ra, and Khensu, the lunar god, was her son by Ptah.
At the time when the Egyptian gods were taking form, the wild cat was venerated for its ferocity and rapacity - qualities which it shared with the lion. And Bastet was originally lion-headed, like the goddesses, Tefnut of Heliopolis and Sekhmet of Memphis with whom she has so often been confused. Although it was in her later cat-headed form that Bastet became so immensely popular, she never ceased to be worshipped as a lion-headed deity, the two forms existing concomitantly through the last thousand years of Egyptian paganism.
The earliest known portrait of Bastet was found in a temple of the fifth dynasty, about 3000 BC. She is revealed as a lion-headed goddess who was honored as "Bastet, Lady of Ankh-taui." One of the earliest pictures of a cat-headed Bastet is in a papyrus of the twenty-first dynasty, now exhibited in the Cairo Museum. The center of the cult of the cat was at Babastis, which was situated east of the Nile Delta. Consequently, Bastet was known as the "Lady of the East" - Sekhmet bearing the title "Lady of the West." Bastet was worshipped, among other goddesses, in the temple at Bubastis as early as the twelfth dynasty, but it was not until a thousand years later that this goddess really came into her own.
In the twenty-second dynasty, about 950 BC, Bastet took precedence over all other goddesses. She was known as "The Lady of Bubastis" and became an immense power in Egypt. King Osorkon II built a magnificent festival hall in Bubastis and dedicated it to Bastet. A relief found on the walls of the sanctuary showed the king endowing the goddess thus: I give thee every land in obeisance, I give thee all power like Ra.
The temple of Bastet has been vividly described by the historian Herodotus, who travelled in Egypt about 450 BC. It stood in the center of the city of Bubastis and was virtually on an island, since it was surrounded (except at its entrance) by canals from the Nile, which were a hundred feet wide and overhung by trees. While the foundations of the surrounding houses had been raised, the temple remained on its original level so that the whole city commanded a view down into it. The temple was a splendid building in the form of a square, and was made of red granite. Stone walls carved with figures surrounded the sacred enclosure, which consisted of a grove of very tall trees within which was hidden a shrine. In the center of the shrine was a statue of Bastet, the cat goddess.
Little is known of what form the rites of the cat goddess took. They probably included processions, litanies, antiphonal singing, invocations, revelations of sacred images and sacrifice. "Divine" cats were always to be found in the shrine of Bastet, for it was as this animal that the goddess was incarnated. Sacred cats kept in her temple were ritually fed, and those who tended them were exempt from liturgical services. The British Museum exhibits wooden figures of girls, carrying cats or kittens, who are thought to have been temple maidens.
One of the principal Egyptian festivals was that held in honor of Bastet. Herodotus stated that, of all the "solemn assemblies," by far the most important and popular was that annually celebrated at Bubastis. He described how, in April and May, thousands of men and women set off on the pilgrimage in parties which crowded into numerous boats. Men played the flute, women a type of cymbal called crotala, and all joined in singing and hand-clapping. As they passed towns, the boats drew near to the banks and the women shouted bawdy jokes to those on the shore, often flinging their clothes up over their heads. This vulgar performance (presumably a form of ritual exhibitionism) was repeated at every town along the riverside and was a sign for those on land to start dancing and join in the festivities.
When the revellers arrived at Bubastis, they celebrated the festival of the cat goddess, sacrificing many victims and consuming vast quantities of wine. A military commander described how he brought out Bastet in procession to her barge at her beautiful feast. This may be a reference to a rite known as the "coming forth," in which the statue of a deity left its own sanctuary and was carried in procession to pay a visit to another god. It was believed that a goddess, immanuent in her statue, was entitled to pleasures and enjoyed a trip such as this, like humans. An inscription on a statue from Bubastis explains that the owner made excellent monuments before her that she might appear to be pleased in all her festivals.
Such was the popularity of the cult of Bastet that images of cats (her animal incarnation) abound in Egypt. Cats have been portrayed in every conceivable activity, sculptured in every material from gold to mud, and in every size from colossal to minute. In Thebes a number of tomb reliefs show cats beneath chairs.
A feature of the Ramesside period (about 1320 BC) was the satirical papyrus. These contained pictures of animals playing the parts of humans, ostensibly displaying their weaknesses and vices. The British Museum has one of the cat driving geese, offering palm branches to mice and fighting armies of rats.
It was during the Bubastite period, the twenty-second dynasty, that the cat cemeteries were laid out along the banks of the Nile. Digging in this area has produced bronze cat effigies and a profusion of cat amulets. The larger figures vary from peaceful, comtemplative cats, dignified and awe inspiring cats, to cats which have an ominous air about them. But all emanate vitality.
Bronze cats, which were made in temple workshops and sold at the stalls, were used as votive offerings at shrines. It is probable that they were worshipped by many people, and recognized as symbols only by the elect.
Little amulet figures of cats, pierced or ringed for suspension on necklaces, were found buried by the hundreds in cat graves, and also behind walls and beneath floors of houses and temples.
They were carved in gold, silver, amethyst, jasper, cornelian, lapis lazuli, agate, quartz, marble, glass, stone and faience; and the mellowed glazes shifted through brilliant blues, greens, yellows and soothing grays. They portrayed cats in every mood and position: mediatative cats, alert cats, crouching, prowling, walking and pouncing cats, and cats who appeared to be in full flight.
Some of these cats were featherweight, others strangely heavy for wearing around the neck. Among the heaviest, and also the most charming of the amulets, consisted of cats on columns. The columns, perhaps three inches in height, were classic in form and were usually made of faience. Often a single cat was poised majestically on high, but sometimes a couple of kittens snuggled together on the top.
Cats were used to decorate necklaces, rings, brooches and pins, and objects such as musical instruments and sceptres.
Although the cult of the cat was at its height during the twenty-second dynasty, it never dwindled during the next nine hundred years either in importance or in popularity. At the end of the Roman period, the image of the cat gradually faded, but it did so in company with those of all other animals, before the emerging image of Christ.
During the whole of Bastet's reign, household cats were treated with the greatest of respect. Many were bejewelled, and they were allowed to eat from the same dishes as their owners. Sick cats were tended solicitiously and stray cats were fed with bread soaked in milk and with fish caught in the Nile, then chopped up for them.
A story is told of how a Persian army once won a victory over Egyptians by taking advantage of their reverence for cats. The Persians were besieging an Egyptian fort when their king had the brilliant idea of ordering his soldiers to throw live cats over the walls. The defending troops apparently allowed the city to be captured rather than risk injuring the animals they knew to be sacred and which they half-suspected to be divine.
The Sun: Cats love basking in patches of sunlight. With his usual charm Topsell, the seventeenth century naturalist, explains his conviction that: The male cat doth vary his eyes with the sunne; for when the sunne ariseth, the apple of his eye is long; towards noon it is round, and the evening it cannot be seene at all, but the whole eye showeth alike. There are Chinese who believe that the size of the pupils of cats' eyes is determined by the height of the sun above the horizon and lift up their lids to tell the time by them.
The cat goddess, Bastet, was first worshipped as a form of the sun, which was the source and sustainer of life and light. Solar power belonged to the male principle and, although Bastet was conceived of as female, during the eighteenth dynasty she was often identified with her father who, in this case, was called not Osiris, but Ra.
The Egyptians believed that when the sun disappeared below the horizon every night, a combat of cosmic proportions took place in the underworld between Ra, the god of light, and Apep, the serpent of darkness. The battle was an eternal one - though the sun rose every morning having overthrown the serpent and chopped him into pieces - Apep was immortal and appeared with renewed avidity the following night.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead includes the Papyrus of Henefer who was a royal scribe of the nineteenth dynasty. Plate 3, a vignette from this papyrus, shows in the background a persea tree and in the foreground a cat with fiery eyes and bristling fur leaping on a spotted serpent and cutting off its head with a large knife. In another papyrus Ra, the sun god, asserts: I am the Great Cat which fought hard by the Persea tree, and the serpent was the devouring Apep.
It was believed that during a solar eclipse, a crucial battle was fought between the powers of light and darkness, and that the sun on whom the lives of the Egyptians depended was in the greatest possible danger. During this time mobs of people assembled in the streets shouting and shaking sistra (a kind of rattle) in an effort to spur on the celestial cat and to terrify the threatening serpent in their struggle beside the Tree of Life.
The central theme of the great epic poems, and the most vital of all heroic engagements, is that in which a man enters into combat with a terrifying monster. The divine cat, in his nocturnal struggle with Apep, takes his place among the solar heroes of all mythologies in their fights with various forms of the Devil.
From the cat's identification with the sun has arisen "cat's cradle," a name given to certain string games. Games played by two people, in which string is wound in patterns round their fingers, are still played all over the world. People in a primitive cultural stage know a great variety of string figures, many of which they use for purposes of sympathetic magic. The cat's cradle is often employed to control the movements of the sun. Members of Congo tribes make cradles of string to encourage the sun to rest from its blazing activities. Eskimos try to entangle the solar cat, for they play their string games after the summer solstice, hoping to hold the sun back from its winter setting.
Egyptians thought of the sun and moon as the eyes of Horus, their sky god. And although the power of the sun was of the masculine principle, the Egyptian word for "eye" was feminine. So Bastet, when she ceased to be identified with her father, was first worshipped as a lion-headed goddess who was described as the "flaming eye of the sun."
As a solar goddess Bastet was at her fiercest. She has been confused with Tefnut, the lion-headed goddess of the Old Kingdom who was known as the "Ethiopian Cat." Tefnut had migrated to Nubia, and she personified the cruel, searing heat of the equatorial sun; but Ra sent Thoth, the ape god of wisdom, to bring her back to Egypt. A faience amulet from Bubastis shows the feet of an animal trampling on captives, and it is inscribed: May Bastet give life and power.
This is not the role usually played by Bastet, even in her lion-headed form, for she was a twin of Sekhmet of Memphis and, whereas both goddesses represented aspects of the sun, Bastet was always considered to be the milder of the two. Sekhmet, "the Great Cat," and Bastet, "the Little Cat," as they were known, were worshipped in the temple of the sun at Heliopolis. Texts speak of Sekhmet as a warlike goddess. She was the "Powerful" and the "Fiery One" who emitted flames against the enemies of the gods, for she incarnated the fierce destructive heat of the desert sun. Bastet respresented that life-giving warmth of the sun which encouraged the growth of vegetation. A text refers to the solar goddess stating: Kindly is she as Bast, terrible is she as Sekhmet.
When people wanted a fierce goddess to protect them they called on Sekhmet; when in need of gentler and more personal help, they turned to Bastet. The Egyptian Trinity was known by the composite name of Sekhmet-Bast-Ra.
When Bastet is lion-headed it is very difficult, in the absence of inscriptions, to distinguish her from other lion goddesses. In coffin paintings, on temple walls and in papyri, the lion-headed Bast is usually portrayed with a uraeus (sacred asp) rising from her head, and carrying in one hand a sceptre and in the other an ankh. Occasionally she also bears a solar disk, but this is more commonly worn by Sekhmet. The ankh, a T-shaped cross with a loop at the top, was a symbol of life; the sceptre and uraeus were both emblems of royalty and the asps represented solar divinity.
At the British Museum there is a colossal sienite figure of a lion-headed goddess who is crowned with a solar disk and holds an ankh in her left hand. The statue is dedicated to a priest-king of Upper Egypt who was "beloved of Pasht." There was also a statue, now broken, of a cat-headed goddess with a headdress of sacred asps each of which was crowned by a sun. Little faience figures of a lion-headed goddess, with a cat seated at her feet, bring out the dual aspect of the sun goddess.
A study by Egyptologists found that there are ways in which the lion-headed Bastet could be distinguished from other leonine goddesses. When the uraeus/crown appears on its own, it is invariably a sign that its wearer is Bastet. The enthroned sistrum bearer is usually Bastet. Only Bastet and Thoth (god of wisdom) are carriers of the sacred eye. Bastet is often found wearing it in both her leonine and her cat forms. The scarab is a sign frequently engraved between the ears of lion- and cat-headed bronzes of Bastet. Apart from Bastet, the only scarab bearing deity is Ptah.
The scarab (sacred beetle) was sometimes depicted in a boat, with its wings extended and holding the globe of the sun in its claws. It was believed that the scarab was self-produced. According to Egyptian folklore, when the male beetle wants to procreate, he searches for a piece of ox-dung which he shapes into a ball and rolls from east to west propelling it with his hind legs. Having dug a hole he then buries the ball, which varies from the size of a walnut to that of a man's fist, for twenty eight days. On the twenty ninth day the beetle throws the dung ball into water, from which its young soon emerge. As the ball of dung was rolled along the ground, so did the sun mount up in the sky, roll across it and then disappear below the horizon. As life came out of the ball of beetle dung, so all life sprang from, and depended on, the sun. Thus the scarab became a symbol and even an incarnation, of solar deity.
The classical writer, Horapollo, maintained that there were three species of beetles and that one has the form of a cat and is radiated, which, from supposed analogy, they have dedicated to the sun - the statue of the diety of Heliopolis having the form of a cat - and from its having thirty fingers corresponding to the thirty days for a solar month. The scarab, with which the cat was so closely associated was an emblem both of the self-begotten deity who created the universe, and also of the world which he created, since the maternal dung was shaped in the form of the globe.
Scarabs made of gold, ivory, faience, stone or wood were later inscribed with the names of kings - combining solar power with the power of royalty. A cat would be drawn on a scarab, and its image was sometimes combined with the name of Bastet.
The solar Bastet could further be distinguished from Sekhmet by the fact that figures of the latter were often decorated with bracelets, armlets and anklets - an unknown experience for the lion-headed Bastet.
Reprinted from this website
You can also follow me at these websites
© Lee Fly
my little sun god
Lore of the Cat
A Mystical History of Catdom
"Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; thou art indeed...the Great Cat." ~ Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes
The White Cat
Most people who readily admit that they "adore" cats would be shocked if one took them literally. The cat has, however, a disdainful aloofness, a quality of meditativeness and inscrutability which has often been mistaken for divinity.
The Deity: The only fully developed cult of the cat existed in Egypt and it lasted over two thousand years. No one knows when the Egyptian cat was first sanctified, and it was never officially considered to be divine. But such a distinction was too subtle for the general public, and Egyptian art provides ample evidence that the Egyptians treated these sacred animals as gods.
The cat was considered very early on to be sacred to the Egyptian goddess Isis. It gradually came to be recognized as an incarnation of deity, and it was as the daughter of Isis and her husband, the sun god Osiris, that the great cat goddess Bastest (Bast or Pasht) emerged. Egyptian gods and goddesses have a confusing way of merging into one another, and it is important to remember this in considering myth and ritual with which Bastet is connected. For instance Osiris, Horus, Ra and Ptah were all different forms of the sun god. Isis merged with Hathor, the cow goddess, and with Mut, the Theban mother goddess. Osiris, Bastet's father, was not only a sun god but also a moon god and god of the underworld; while Isis, her mother, was a sun/moon/earth goddess. The worship of Bastet overlapped that of Isis, Hathor and Mut, and also that of the lion goddesses, Tefnut and Sekhmet, according to the district and to which of Bastet's many aspects were being stressed. The cat goddess had a solar son, Nefertem, by the sun god, Amen-Ra, and Khensu, the lunar god, was her son by Ptah.
At the time when the Egyptian gods were taking form, the wild cat was venerated for its ferocity and rapacity - qualities which it shared with the lion. And Bastet was originally lion-headed, like the goddesses, Tefnut of Heliopolis and Sekhmet of Memphis with whom she has so often been confused. Although it was in her later cat-headed form that Bastet became so immensely popular, she never ceased to be worshipped as a lion-headed deity, the two forms existing concomitantly through the last thousand years of Egyptian paganism.
The earliest known portrait of Bastet was found in a temple of the fifth dynasty, about 3000 BC. She is revealed as a lion-headed goddess who was honored as "Bastet, Lady of Ankh-taui." One of the earliest pictures of a cat-headed Bastet is in a papyrus of the twenty-first dynasty, now exhibited in the Cairo Museum. The center of the cult of the cat was at Babastis, which was situated east of the Nile Delta. Consequently, Bastet was known as the "Lady of the East" - Sekhmet bearing the title "Lady of the West." Bastet was worshipped, among other goddesses, in the temple at Bubastis as early as the twelfth dynasty, but it was not until a thousand years later that this goddess really came into her own.
In the twenty-second dynasty, about 950 BC, Bastet took precedence over all other goddesses. She was known as "The Lady of Bubastis" and became an immense power in Egypt. King Osorkon II built a magnificent festival hall in Bubastis and dedicated it to Bastet. A relief found on the walls of the sanctuary showed the king endowing the goddess thus: I give thee every land in obeisance, I give thee all power like Ra.
The temple of Bastet has been vividly described by the historian Herodotus, who travelled in Egypt about 450 BC. It stood in the center of the city of Bubastis and was virtually on an island, since it was surrounded (except at its entrance) by canals from the Nile, which were a hundred feet wide and overhung by trees. While the foundations of the surrounding houses had been raised, the temple remained on its original level so that the whole city commanded a view down into it. The temple was a splendid building in the form of a square, and was made of red granite. Stone walls carved with figures surrounded the sacred enclosure, which consisted of a grove of very tall trees within which was hidden a shrine. In the center of the shrine was a statue of Bastet, the cat goddess.
Little is known of what form the rites of the cat goddess took. They probably included processions, litanies, antiphonal singing, invocations, revelations of sacred images and sacrifice. "Divine" cats were always to be found in the shrine of Bastet, for it was as this animal that the goddess was incarnated. Sacred cats kept in her temple were ritually fed, and those who tended them were exempt from liturgical services. The British Museum exhibits wooden figures of girls, carrying cats or kittens, who are thought to have been temple maidens.
One of the principal Egyptian festivals was that held in honor of Bastet. Herodotus stated that, of all the "solemn assemblies," by far the most important and popular was that annually celebrated at Bubastis. He described how, in April and May, thousands of men and women set off on the pilgrimage in parties which crowded into numerous boats. Men played the flute, women a type of cymbal called crotala, and all joined in singing and hand-clapping. As they passed towns, the boats drew near to the banks and the women shouted bawdy jokes to those on the shore, often flinging their clothes up over their heads. This vulgar performance (presumably a form of ritual exhibitionism) was repeated at every town along the riverside and was a sign for those on land to start dancing and join in the festivities.
When the revellers arrived at Bubastis, they celebrated the festival of the cat goddess, sacrificing many victims and consuming vast quantities of wine. A military commander described how he brought out Bastet in procession to her barge at her beautiful feast. This may be a reference to a rite known as the "coming forth," in which the statue of a deity left its own sanctuary and was carried in procession to pay a visit to another god. It was believed that a goddess, immanuent in her statue, was entitled to pleasures and enjoyed a trip such as this, like humans. An inscription on a statue from Bubastis explains that the owner made excellent monuments before her that she might appear to be pleased in all her festivals.
Such was the popularity of the cult of Bastet that images of cats (her animal incarnation) abound in Egypt. Cats have been portrayed in every conceivable activity, sculptured in every material from gold to mud, and in every size from colossal to minute. In Thebes a number of tomb reliefs show cats beneath chairs.
A feature of the Ramesside period (about 1320 BC) was the satirical papyrus. These contained pictures of animals playing the parts of humans, ostensibly displaying their weaknesses and vices. The British Museum has one of the cat driving geese, offering palm branches to mice and fighting armies of rats.
It was during the Bubastite period, the twenty-second dynasty, that the cat cemeteries were laid out along the banks of the Nile. Digging in this area has produced bronze cat effigies and a profusion of cat amulets. The larger figures vary from peaceful, comtemplative cats, dignified and awe inspiring cats, to cats which have an ominous air about them. But all emanate vitality.
Bronze cats, which were made in temple workshops and sold at the stalls, were used as votive offerings at shrines. It is probable that they were worshipped by many people, and recognized as symbols only by the elect.
Little amulet figures of cats, pierced or ringed for suspension on necklaces, were found buried by the hundreds in cat graves, and also behind walls and beneath floors of houses and temples.
They were carved in gold, silver, amethyst, jasper, cornelian, lapis lazuli, agate, quartz, marble, glass, stone and faience; and the mellowed glazes shifted through brilliant blues, greens, yellows and soothing grays. They portrayed cats in every mood and position: mediatative cats, alert cats, crouching, prowling, walking and pouncing cats, and cats who appeared to be in full flight.
Some of these cats were featherweight, others strangely heavy for wearing around the neck. Among the heaviest, and also the most charming of the amulets, consisted of cats on columns. The columns, perhaps three inches in height, were classic in form and were usually made of faience. Often a single cat was poised majestically on high, but sometimes a couple of kittens snuggled together on the top.
Cats were used to decorate necklaces, rings, brooches and pins, and objects such as musical instruments and sceptres.
Although the cult of the cat was at its height during the twenty-second dynasty, it never dwindled during the next nine hundred years either in importance or in popularity. At the end of the Roman period, the image of the cat gradually faded, but it did so in company with those of all other animals, before the emerging image of Christ.
During the whole of Bastet's reign, household cats were treated with the greatest of respect. Many were bejewelled, and they were allowed to eat from the same dishes as their owners. Sick cats were tended solicitiously and stray cats were fed with bread soaked in milk and with fish caught in the Nile, then chopped up for them.
A story is told of how a Persian army once won a victory over Egyptians by taking advantage of their reverence for cats. The Persians were besieging an Egyptian fort when their king had the brilliant idea of ordering his soldiers to throw live cats over the walls. The defending troops apparently allowed the city to be captured rather than risk injuring the animals they knew to be sacred and which they half-suspected to be divine.
The Sun: Cats love basking in patches of sunlight. With his usual charm Topsell, the seventeenth century naturalist, explains his conviction that: The male cat doth vary his eyes with the sunne; for when the sunne ariseth, the apple of his eye is long; towards noon it is round, and the evening it cannot be seene at all, but the whole eye showeth alike. There are Chinese who believe that the size of the pupils of cats' eyes is determined by the height of the sun above the horizon and lift up their lids to tell the time by them.
The cat goddess, Bastet, was first worshipped as a form of the sun, which was the source and sustainer of life and light. Solar power belonged to the male principle and, although Bastet was conceived of as female, during the eighteenth dynasty she was often identified with her father who, in this case, was called not Osiris, but Ra.
The Egyptians believed that when the sun disappeared below the horizon every night, a combat of cosmic proportions took place in the underworld between Ra, the god of light, and Apep, the serpent of darkness. The battle was an eternal one - though the sun rose every morning having overthrown the serpent and chopped him into pieces - Apep was immortal and appeared with renewed avidity the following night.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead includes the Papyrus of Henefer who was a royal scribe of the nineteenth dynasty. Plate 3, a vignette from this papyrus, shows in the background a persea tree and in the foreground a cat with fiery eyes and bristling fur leaping on a spotted serpent and cutting off its head with a large knife. In another papyrus Ra, the sun god, asserts: I am the Great Cat which fought hard by the Persea tree, and the serpent was the devouring Apep.
It was believed that during a solar eclipse, a crucial battle was fought between the powers of light and darkness, and that the sun on whom the lives of the Egyptians depended was in the greatest possible danger. During this time mobs of people assembled in the streets shouting and shaking sistra (a kind of rattle) in an effort to spur on the celestial cat and to terrify the threatening serpent in their struggle beside the Tree of Life.
The central theme of the great epic poems, and the most vital of all heroic engagements, is that in which a man enters into combat with a terrifying monster. The divine cat, in his nocturnal struggle with Apep, takes his place among the solar heroes of all mythologies in their fights with various forms of the Devil.
From the cat's identification with the sun has arisen "cat's cradle," a name given to certain string games. Games played by two people, in which string is wound in patterns round their fingers, are still played all over the world. People in a primitive cultural stage know a great variety of string figures, many of which they use for purposes of sympathetic magic. The cat's cradle is often employed to control the movements of the sun. Members of Congo tribes make cradles of string to encourage the sun to rest from its blazing activities. Eskimos try to entangle the solar cat, for they play their string games after the summer solstice, hoping to hold the sun back from its winter setting.
Egyptians thought of the sun and moon as the eyes of Horus, their sky god. And although the power of the sun was of the masculine principle, the Egyptian word for "eye" was feminine. So Bastet, when she ceased to be identified with her father, was first worshipped as a lion-headed goddess who was described as the "flaming eye of the sun."
As a solar goddess Bastet was at her fiercest. She has been confused with Tefnut, the lion-headed goddess of the Old Kingdom who was known as the "Ethiopian Cat." Tefnut had migrated to Nubia, and she personified the cruel, searing heat of the equatorial sun; but Ra sent Thoth, the ape god of wisdom, to bring her back to Egypt. A faience amulet from Bubastis shows the feet of an animal trampling on captives, and it is inscribed: May Bastet give life and power.
This is not the role usually played by Bastet, even in her lion-headed form, for she was a twin of Sekhmet of Memphis and, whereas both goddesses represented aspects of the sun, Bastet was always considered to be the milder of the two. Sekhmet, "the Great Cat," and Bastet, "the Little Cat," as they were known, were worshipped in the temple of the sun at Heliopolis. Texts speak of Sekhmet as a warlike goddess. She was the "Powerful" and the "Fiery One" who emitted flames against the enemies of the gods, for she incarnated the fierce destructive heat of the desert sun. Bastet respresented that life-giving warmth of the sun which encouraged the growth of vegetation. A text refers to the solar goddess stating: Kindly is she as Bast, terrible is she as Sekhmet.
When people wanted a fierce goddess to protect them they called on Sekhmet; when in need of gentler and more personal help, they turned to Bastet. The Egyptian Trinity was known by the composite name of Sekhmet-Bast-Ra.
When Bastet is lion-headed it is very difficult, in the absence of inscriptions, to distinguish her from other lion goddesses. In coffin paintings, on temple walls and in papyri, the lion-headed Bast is usually portrayed with a uraeus (sacred asp) rising from her head, and carrying in one hand a sceptre and in the other an ankh. Occasionally she also bears a solar disk, but this is more commonly worn by Sekhmet. The ankh, a T-shaped cross with a loop at the top, was a symbol of life; the sceptre and uraeus were both emblems of royalty and the asps represented solar divinity.
At the British Museum there is a colossal sienite figure of a lion-headed goddess who is crowned with a solar disk and holds an ankh in her left hand. The statue is dedicated to a priest-king of Upper Egypt who was "beloved of Pasht." There was also a statue, now broken, of a cat-headed goddess with a headdress of sacred asps each of which was crowned by a sun. Little faience figures of a lion-headed goddess, with a cat seated at her feet, bring out the dual aspect of the sun goddess.
A study by Egyptologists found that there are ways in which the lion-headed Bastet could be distinguished from other leonine goddesses. When the uraeus/crown appears on its own, it is invariably a sign that its wearer is Bastet. The enthroned sistrum bearer is usually Bastet. Only Bastet and Thoth (god of wisdom) are carriers of the sacred eye. Bastet is often found wearing it in both her leonine and her cat forms. The scarab is a sign frequently engraved between the ears of lion- and cat-headed bronzes of Bastet. Apart from Bastet, the only scarab bearing deity is Ptah.
The scarab (sacred beetle) was sometimes depicted in a boat, with its wings extended and holding the globe of the sun in its claws. It was believed that the scarab was self-produced. According to Egyptian folklore, when the male beetle wants to procreate, he searches for a piece of ox-dung which he shapes into a ball and rolls from east to west propelling it with his hind legs. Having dug a hole he then buries the ball, which varies from the size of a walnut to that of a man's fist, for twenty eight days. On the twenty ninth day the beetle throws the dung ball into water, from which its young soon emerge. As the ball of dung was rolled along the ground, so did the sun mount up in the sky, roll across it and then disappear below the horizon. As life came out of the ball of beetle dung, so all life sprang from, and depended on, the sun. Thus the scarab became a symbol and even an incarnation, of solar deity.
The classical writer, Horapollo, maintained that there were three species of beetles and that one has the form of a cat and is radiated, which, from supposed analogy, they have dedicated to the sun - the statue of the diety of Heliopolis having the form of a cat - and from its having thirty fingers corresponding to the thirty days for a solar month. The scarab, with which the cat was so closely associated was an emblem both of the self-begotten deity who created the universe, and also of the world which he created, since the maternal dung was shaped in the form of the globe.
Scarabs made of gold, ivory, faience, stone or wood were later inscribed with the names of kings - combining solar power with the power of royalty. A cat would be drawn on a scarab, and its image was sometimes combined with the name of Bastet.
The solar Bastet could further be distinguished from Sekhmet by the fact that figures of the latter were often decorated with bracelets, armlets and anklets - an unknown experience for the lion-headed Bastet.
Reprinted from this website
You can also follow me at these websites
© Lee Fly