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The goddess of Egypt Bastet (Bast)
Bastet (Bast) - the goddess of joy and fun
Bastet - the goddess of joy and fun, was depicted in the image of a cat.
Every cat in Egypt was considered the embodiment of the deity, instilling reverence and fear.
During the fire in the house, first of all, they saved the cat.
When a cat died, the owners went into mourning, and killing a cat, even involuntarily, was punishable by death.
An eyewitness told that already at the sunset of the Egyptian civilization, when Egypt was under the rule of Rome, "a Roman killed a cat, and a crowd ran to the house of the guilty one, but neither the authorities sent by the king to persuade, nor the general fear inspired by Rome, could free a person from revenge, although he did it accidentally."
Mummies of cats are often found in Egyptian tombs.
Ra has only one eye, but it has many incarnations.
It is embodied in the "daughters of Ra"; sometimes they are meek, and sometimes they are frightening.
They all became goddesses, and the Egyptians gave each of them special features.
The affectionate cat Bast is the most peaceful of the daughters of Ra.
People loved her, so her images are very common.
Bast received all his kindness from Ra, and Sekhmet received all his cruelty.
Nevertheless, the ancient Egyptians had great difficulty distinguishing between the cat goddess and the lioness goddess, because both animals are characterized by an unbridled temper.
Indeed, in the texts, Sekhmet is often called "furious Bast".
Apparently, Bast began to be considered truly peaceful quite late, and only then did she finally separate herself from Sekhmet.
Bast is the clear eye of Ra, full of calm and serenity.
And in this she resembles a cat taking care of her offspring.
Her images
In the early epochs, Bast was most often depicted as a lioness, which was the reason for her identification with Sekhmet: at that time, Bast was one of her incarnations.
This is how it appears to us on the bas reliefs of the pyramid of Pharaoh Sahur from the V dynasty.
We can see here how the ruler worships the goddess Bast with the head of a lioness.
Thirty years later, King Mikerin, who built the famous pyramid, is depicted next to the goddess Bast in the temple dedicated to him in the valley, located in Giza.
The image of the cat Bast became more widespread in the era of the New Kingdom and in the III transition period (1070-712 BC).
This incarnation of the goddess is familiar to us, primarily due to votive bronze statuettes, which became more and more numerous as we approached the Late Period.
We see Bast sitting in an elegant pose or carefully feeding his kittens.
No wonder the Egyptians made her the patroness of mothers and newborns!
Note that a significant part of these small figurines were found in Bubastis and in Saqqara.
Myths about Bast
Bast is the embodiment of the clear and serene eye of Ra.
In this, she is contrasted with Sekhmet, who embodies the formidable essence of the sun.
However, the Egyptians often confused the two goddesses.
Bast will give up the guise of a lioness late enough and finally become an affectionate cat.
But cats are also predators!
The cat goddess hails from Bubastis, a city in the Nile Delta, gained real fame when the pharaohs of the XXII dynasty (945-712 BC) settled in her patrimony.
From the bloodthirsty lioness she was before, resembling the angry goddess Sekhmet, Bast turned into a calmly sitting cat.
Daughter of the sun and the eye of the star
The eye of Ra, the solar disk, had several daughters, and all of them were predators with a violent temper.
Two lionesses, Tefnut and Sekhmet, were reputed to be the most dangerous of them; these creatures were so indomitable and strong that even their divine father could hardly cope with them.
The daughters of Ra, whom the Egyptians respectfully called formidable goddesses, waged an endless struggle with the forces of darkness, constantly trying to take away the power of the sun over the world where it shines.
However, these goddesses could also be meek.
In this case, they turned from lionesses into cats.
One of them, famous throughout Egypt, was called "Bast, the lady of Bubastis, the eye of Ra, the heavenly lady".
She got this name from the name of her hometown, Bubastis.
The third transition period was in the yard, there were still about a thousand years left before the Birth of Christ.
The myth of the Distant Goddess
Bast, as the eye of Ra, was inevitably associated with the "myth of a distant goddess".
This myth tells us about the origin of the daughters of Ra.
In ancient times, when people ventured to oppose the sun god, he, at the same time saddened and angry, could not decide what to do with the rebels.
He called all the gods to a council and announced: "(People) have been plotting against me.
Tell me what you would do with them.
You see, I am full of doubts; but I donot want to kill them without first hearing your thoughts."
The gods advised Ra to severely punish the ungrateful humanity: "The fear that you inspire will be great if your eye turns to those who revile you.
Send it to the people, so that it will kill the treacherous conspirators in your name.
Do not let your eye remain on your forehead, let it come down from it!"
And the eye came down from the forehead of Ra, turning into one of the daughters of God.
Some say that it was Hathor, others Sekhmet, and others Bast!
Anyway, the goddess made a terrible massacre.
But the lowered lioness could not be stopped in any way.
To finally get her to return, Ra had to resort to a trick.
He took seven hundred pitchers of didi (a kind of beer), gave the drink the appearance of human blood and poured it over the fields.
Seeing this ,the "terrible goddess" left people alone and attacked the beer.
Intoxicated, she could no longer exterminate mortals and returned, meek and affectionate as a cat, to Ra who sent her.
So the goddess turned into Bast.
Domestic cats, which the ancient Egyptians called by the understandable word "miu", were, apparently, brought to the country only around 2100 BC.
Since these animals were very adept at dealing with mice that constantly raided grain barns, they very quickly gained a reputation as loyal defenders of one of the main treasures of the country - grain reserves.
In ancient Egypt, even the gods could suffer from the small troubles of everyday life.
So, one day, Bast, feasting in the company of other gods, launched her beautiful teeth into a roast and came across a small, but very sharp bone, which almost cost her her life - a sad fate for a god.
But fortunately, the story ended well: the goddess cleared her throat thoroughly, and then unleashed all her indignation on the inattentive cooks.
Meek, but unpredictable
"I am the daughter of Atum," Bast declares.
Her meekness, unshakable as the creation itself, is contrasted with the cruelty of lionesses called to fight the forces of evil.
Nevertheless, Bast should still be treated with some apprehension.
The Egyptians knew that the bloodthirsty nature of the goddess only slumbers.
Legend has it that after the infamous massacre, the wise One, calling for the help of Shu, deprived the goddess of ferocity.
However, at the end of each year, on five epagomenal days, which were considered extremely unfavorable, Sekhmet's temper may prevail, and the "terrible goddess" with her heavily armed demons may again descend on the earth!
Of course, Bast is a submissive daughter, but she should be trusted only with the greatest caution.
This undoubtedly explains why so many votive figurines were left for the cat goddess in ancient Egyptian temples (especially in Bubastis).
Bast was just one of the incarnations of the eye of Ra, so it is not surprising that the Egyptians rarely surrounded her with family.
But, for example, in the city of Leontopol, whose inhabitants revered Tefnut, another daughter of Ra, who was famous for a much more hot tempered temper, her brother and paredra Shu were also worshipped.
Bast and Basti
In order for Bast not to be left alone, her clergy gave her (however, quite late) a spouse named Basti.
Formally, this god does not play any role in ancient Egyptian mythology.
However, thanks to him, Bast had a son named Mahes, in whose honor Pharaoh Osorkon II (924-909 BC) built a temple in Bubastis.
The Egyptians worshipped Mahes as the god of thunderstorms and storms.
He definitely inherited his violent temper from the predator's mother!
The Cult of Bast
Temples, necropolises, festivals, thousands of bronze statuettes... all this gives us some idea of how popular Bast was, despite its by no means impeccable reputation.
It seems that the Egyptians trusted their goddesses, including the most predatory of them.
Bast was the goddess of Bubastis, the capital of the XVIII nome of the Delta.
The roots of her cult go back to the Ancient Kingdom, namely to the period of the reign of the IV dynasty.
But a special honor was paid to the cat goddess by the Libyan kings from the XXII dynasty, who moved their capital to Bubastis.
Herodotus tells us that the annual holidays celebrated in honor of Bast in Bubastis attracted whole crowds of believers in the Late period.
Whole necropolises for cats
The scale of the cult of the goddess Bast is also indicated by the number of cat necropolises discovered by archaeologists in different parts of the Egyptian kingdom.
Among the most famous of them, Bubasteyon, located in Saqqara, is particularly worth noting.
In this large cemetery in the rocks towering over the city, there are several thousand tombs of cats.
Some were embalmed and wrapped in bandages, while others rest in real small zoomorphic (that is, made in the form of an animal, in this case - a cat) coffins.
The rituals dedicated to the buried cats were worthy of the cult of the deceased ancestors.
In memory of these cats and as a sign of respect to the goddess Bast, the Egyptians decorated small wooden plaques with miniature sculptures of cats made of the same material.
Hundreds of similar items were found in the tombs of Sakkara, as well as in the temple of Bast in Bubastis.
Archaeologists have discovered other necropolises, not only in Bubastis, but also in Tanis, Beni Hasan (the Middle Kingdom, where another lioness goddess was worshipped - Pahet), and, finally, in Thebes.
Thousands of bronze statuettes
Ancient Egyptian sculptors who worshipped Bast made thousands of bronze statuettes of the goddess.
A significant part of them dates back to the Late period.
Among these images, three iconographic types can be distinguished: a cat sitting in an elegant pose; a lying cat feeding kittens, and, finally, a standing woman with a cat's head.
There were so many such products that now at least one of the touching Bast figurines will not be found in a rare museum.
Bast Temple in Bubastis
Bubastis (from Per Bast (ancient Egyptian) - Possession of Bast) was the capital of the XVIII nome of Lower Egypt.
It was very well located - on the way from Memphis to the Sinai mines - and did not stop growing.
The Golden age came to town with the coming to power of the Libyan pharaohs of the XXII dynasty and famous of Osorkon II, who ruled from 924 to 909 BC From the writings of Herodotus we can learn, that near Bubastis on was built in honor of the goddess temple, which according to the historian, a special mention: "the other, of course, bigger and richer, but none of them did not look happy".
This temple stood slightly lower down the slope than the city itself, and divided the sacred lake in two, resembling an artificial island.
Here, the Greek continues, "a whole forest of giant trees surrounds a huge sanctuary in which the goddess reigns."
The building, excavated by the Swiss archaeologist Eduard Naville in 1887-1889, occupied from two to three hundred meters in length; inside there were several rooms: a large front hall (the creation of Osorkon II), the hall of the Sed festival and a large hypostyle hall, rebuilt under Osorkon III (883-855 BC).
Unfortunately, it was not possible to completely recreate the plan of the building.
A few meters from the temple of Bast was the temple of her son, the terrible lion god Mahes.
This religious complex was complemented by a cat necropolis.
Worship of the goddess Bast in her sanctuary
Herodotus, who described in detail the appearance of the temple of the goddess Bast in Bubastis, tells us about the rituals performed in it and, in particular, about the holiday that was celebrated during the Nile floods (in accordance with the myth of the return of a distant and softened goddess), on the 13th day of the month of Paofi (August September).
Here is what he writes about the events of this day: "The main (holiday) and the most famous is celebrated in Bubastis, and it is dedicated to Artemis (this goddess was identified with Bast) [...]
When the Egyptians go to the city of Bubastis, they do this.
Women and men sail there together, and there are many of them on each barge.
Upon arrival in Bubastis, they celebrate a holiday with magnificent sacrifices: they drink more grape wine on this holiday than for the rest of the year.
According to local residents, up to seven hundred thousand people of both sexes gather here."
Although Herodotus is not very specific in describing the rites themselves, at least from his text it is clear how popular the goddess was.
It is also worth noting that in her meek appearance, the cat Bast, as a caring mother, was the patroness of the home.
And, of course, first of all, she bestowed her favor on those families in which a happy event was expected - the birth of a child.
The patroness of the home
The texts that speak of "peaceful Bast, affectionate and joyful Bast" definitely prove that the Egyptians noticed with what tenderness cats take care of their offspring.
It is not surprising that women revered her as the goddess of childbirth and the patroness of the home.
As we have already told, many bronze statuettes depicting a cat feeding kittens were found in the temple of Bast and on the necropolises dedicated to her.
Votive figurines were donated to the cat Goddess and they prayed that the whole family and, most importantly, the children would always be healthy.
More material on this topic
Nubian dynasty of the "black Pharaohs" Temples of Abu Simbel Secrets of the Great Pyramids Funeral Temple of Queen Hatshepsut Jacobin Museums in Morla Letters to the dead of ancient Egypt
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