Bastet- Egyptian GodDeity"Lady of the East"

The Lioness

In the Old Kingdom, Bastet was no cat. The Pyramid Texts invoke her alongside the fiercest deities as a guardian of the pharaoh and of Ra, and her earliest cult at Bubastis presented a lioness-headed goddess of war. Her name was written with the bas-jar hieroglyph and a feminine t-ending, connecting her to the ointment jar even in her most dangerous form. Votive bronzes from these centuries show a standing woman with a lioness head, teeth bared. She was virtually indistinguishable from Sekhmet.

The transformation came slowly. As Egyptians domesticated cats and watched them kill the mice and cobras that threatened granaries and children, the cat entered sacred art. Later votive bronzes replaced the standing lioness with a serene seated cat, ears pricked, tail curled around its paws. By the first millennium BCE, the shift was complete.

The Distant Goddess

Bastet was a daughter of Ra and one of the forms of his Eye, the feminine solar power that could act on its own to protect or destroy. The defining myth of this role survives in the Demotic "Myth of the Sun's Eye" preserved in Leiden Papyrus I 384, with earlier versions inscribed at the temple of Philae.

The Eye of Ra, in the shape of a raging lioness, fled Egypt for the deserts of Nubia. Without her, Ra's power dimmed. He sent Thoth in disguise to bring her home. Thoth did not fight her. He told her stories, one after another, fables of mice and vultures and lions, until her fury cooled enough for her to listen. Then he offered music, wine, and dance. As the goddess journeyed north toward Egypt, she waded into the Nile's waters and her form changed. The lioness became a cat. The scorching heat became gentle warmth. When she reached Bubastis, the city erupted in celebration. The annual festival of Bastet reenacted this homecoming: the raging power of the sun, tamed by pleasure, returned to the land that needed her.

The Cat Beneath the Ished Tree

Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead contains a vignette that persisted across centuries of funerary art: a great cat crouching beneath the sacred ished tree at Heliopolis, slicing through the serpent Apophis with a knife. The image was identified with Ra in feline form, or with Bastet herself. In this scene, the two were interchangeable.

The Coffin Texts invoke her claws and teeth as weapons against the enemies of the dead. Each night, when Apophis rose from the primeval waters to devour the sun, Bastet was numbered among the divine defenders of the solar barque. Her feline ferocity turned against the serpent in the darkest hours of the Duat. The domestic cat by the hearth and the cosmic defender against chaos wore the same face.

The Festival at Bubastis

Bastet's cult center was Bubastis, Per-Bastet, in the eastern Nile Delta. Herodotus visited around 450 BCE and called its temple the most beautiful in Egypt: an island surrounded by canals, its sacred grove visible from every part of the city. During the Twenty-second Dynasty, the Libyan pharaoh Osorkon II built a monumental festival hall there, its reliefs depicting his sed-festival jubilee in his thirtieth regnal year.

Herodotus left the most vivid account of the annual festival. Boats full of men and women sailed to Bubastis, women playing castanets, men playing flutes. At each town along the river they moored to exchange ribald jokes and songs with the locals. At the temple they offered sacrifices and celebrated with feasting and dancing. Seven hundred thousand people attended, Herodotus claimed, and more wine was drunk during those days than in all the rest of the year combined. Her sacred instrument was the sistrum, a rattle whose soft jingling was believed to pacify divine anger.

Sacred Cats

Cats were sacred throughout Egypt, but nowhere more than in Bubastis, where they were bred, tended, and mummified when they died. Diodorus Siculus witnessed the consequences of this reverence firsthand: a Roman soldier who killed a cat was dragged from his house by an Egyptian mob and lynched, despite the Ptolemaic government's attempts to intervene.

The cat cemeteries at Bubastis and Saqqara contained hundreds of thousands of mummified cats, some beloved pets, others bred as votive offerings for pilgrims to purchase and present to the temple. The devotion produced remarkable art. Late Period bronze cat statues captured feline grace with striking naturalism. The Gayer-Anderson Cat in the British Museum, with its gold nose ring, silver-inlaid collar, and poised expression, survives as the form perfected.

In households across Egypt, from the workers' village at Deir el-Medina to the great Delta cities, cat amulets and figurines guarded doorways. Women invoked Bastet during pregnancy and childbirth. She watched over children and warded off the snakes and scorpions that domestic cats hunted in the flesh. The goddess who had raged across Nubia as a lioness kept her vigil, in the end, at the threshold of the home.