The Guardian Cat of Bubastis

The Recorder
Wyrdlore Society

Fieldnotes — Tell-Basta, the Nile Delta, high summer

I went looking for Bastet where she was supposedly most at home, in the low mounds of Tell-Basta, the site the Greeks called Bubastis, out in the eastern Nile Delta where the ground still holds the shape of temple walls beneath dust and salt grass. There is not much standing now. What remains is mostly rubble, granite fragments, and the outline of an enclosure once ringed, so the old accounts describe, by a moat, so that the goddess's house sat on something like an island within the town.

Herodotus visited and left an account of the festival held there, describing crowds arriving by boat along the canals with music, wine and considerable noise, more people gathering for her feast, he claimed, than for any other in Egypt. Whether his numbers can be trusted is another matter; ancient travel writers were not above rounding a crowd upward for effect. But the shape of the devotion he describes, loud and joyful rather than solemn, matches what else we know of Bastet. She was not primarily a goddess of dread.

She began, most sources agree, as a lioness, one of several fierce feline goddesses of Lower Egypt, close kin in image to Sekhmet further south. Somewhere across the centuries, as Egypt's political centre shifted and local cults blended and separated, Bastet's iconography softened. By the Late Period she is shown far more often as a seated domestic cat, sometimes with kittens at her feet, sometimes wearing a scarab or an ankh, gold rings on the finer bronzes. The claws are still there if you look closely. The goddess did not give up the lioness; she kept it in reserve.

What she was asked to guard is fairly consistent across the record: the home, the granary, women in childbirth, small children, and the boundary between a household and whatever might cross it in the dark, illness, misfortune, hostile spirits. Cats themselves, kept in Egyptian houses chiefly to manage snakes and rats among the grain stores, seem to have carried some of that same charge outward into belief. A working animal became, over generations, a kind of resident charm. Diodorus Siculus records, with evident disapproval, how seriously this protection was taken: he describes a Roman visitor killed by a Delta crowd for harming a cat, with no plea from the king's own officials enough to save him. I would not stake much on every particular of that anecdote, and later writers, myself included, are wise to hold such stories at arm's length. But the temperature of the reaction he describes tells its own truth about how the animal was regarded.

Cemeteries at Bubastis and elsewhere in the Delta held vast numbers of mummified cats, wrapped with the same care given to more obviously human dead, offered as gifts to the goddess by pilgrims. Whether each animal was thought to become Bastet, to carry a petition to her, or simply to please her by association, the sources do not fully agree, and I will not pretend to settle the question for them.

Standing in the flattened dust of Tell-Basta, the old festival feeling is not obvious. Wind, dry canal beds, a few local cats moving low between the stones, entirely unbothered by my note-taking, as their kind is said to have always been here. It is easy, on a quiet visit, to forget how loud this ground once was. But the animals underfoot, unhurried and completely at ease, are perhaps the truer inheritance.

The Recorder keeps the Society's archive, writes the framing pieces and the seasonal notes, and signs nothing personally. Whether the role has been held by one person or several is not recorded, which the Society considers appropriate.