Cat Goddess of Protection and Joy
In the Old Kingdom Bastet was a lioness goddess akin in temper to the bloodthirsty Sekhmet; by the first millennium BCE her image had softened into a cat-headed woman carrying a basket and a sistrum rattle, often with kittens at her feet. Lioness and cat were two faces of the same power — the raging and the pacified aspects of the Eye of the sun god — and Bastet became the guardian of the household, of pregnant women and children, and a goddess of music and festivity. The esteem Egyptians held for the domestic cat, killer of granary mice and snakes, carried her cult with it.
Her center was Bubastis in the eastern Delta, modern Tell Basta near Zagazig. Herodotus, in Book II of the Histories, left the most vivid eyewitness account of any Egyptian festival: pilgrims sailed to Bubastis by the boatload with flutes and clappers, singing and drinking along the river, the crowd reckoned at seven hundred thousand, and more wine was consumed during the feast than in all the rest of the year.
The sanctuaries at Bubastis and Saqqara have yielded bronze cat figurines and cat mummies in enormous numbers — devotees paid to have temple-raised cats mummified as offerings. In the late nineteenth century, cat mummies from a cemetery at Beni Hasan were shipped to Britain by the ton for use as fertilizer.
