Bastet Goddess, is a goddess of Egyptian mythology, also called Bast, whose mission was to protect the home and symbolize the joy of life, as it is considered the deity of harmony and happiness. Bastet Goddess is the personification of the warm rays of the sun and exercises its beneficial powers.
She embodied the peaceful aspects of dangerous goddesses such as Sekhmet, who expressed the evil qualities of the Sun.
As the eye of Atum, likewise, she was associated with the Moon and protected births and pregnant women from disease and evil spirits. also, Bastet Goddess is a peaceful goddess but, when angry, she transforms into a lioness-headed woman, assimilating herself to the goddess Sejmet and, sometimes, she is much more violent than the latter
The Goddess Bastet has also been referred to by the following titles: “the lady of the East” for her protective nature, “the devouring Woman” for the meaning of her name, and “the tearing” for her destructive second nature.
On several occasions, it has been understood that she is either the daughter of the sun god Ra or the daughter of Amun, the god of air. She assisted Ra in his nightly travels across the sky in his million-year-old boat. The myth says that she protects him against his nemesis, Apophis, the serpent demon of chaos. This role allowed her to acquire another title: “La Dame de Flamme”.
Like most Egyptian goddesses, two sides personify her: docile and aggressive. On her gentle side, she appears as the protector of homes and pregnant women. Her vicious nature manifests itself in incredible battles where she protects the pharaoh, and here she takes the form of her twin sister (sometimes seen as another aspect of herself), Sejmet.
cat goddess is represented as a woman with the head of a domesticated cat, a lioness (goddess of the light of the sun), or as a sand cat of the desert. in like manner She holds with her a sacred rattle, a small pouch on her left shoulder, the sistrum in her right hand, and kitten figurines surrounding her feet. She possesses the Utchat or Uraeus, the revered and clairvoyant eye of Ra used as an instrument for his vengeance. She is also known by other names such as Bast, Ubastis, or Ubasti.
was considered a sacred cat and the Egyptians gave great importance to cats because of her.
Any crime committed against cats was considered very serious and very unfortunate. Her priests considered cats as sacred animals in their temples and when they died they were mummified and presented as an offering to the goddess.
Cats are revered because of their protective nature because they kill vermin that destroy crops. In fact, in the ancient city of Bubastis, some 300,000 cats were mummified and buried in their cemetery. Later, when the cat’s owner dies, they bury it next to their cat.
Most cat owners have heard the joke that their cat thinks he or she is the king or queen of the house. If you lived in ancient Egypt, that approach might have been much closer to reality.
Cats in ancient Egypt were so beloved that hurting one was a serious crime. They were adorned with gold jewelry, fed the finest food, and even buried with honors befitting royalty.
This was not just because Egypt was a cat-loving society. Cats were revered as the sacred animals of Bastet, one of the most important protective goddesses in the Egyptian pantheon.
Most deities in ancient Egypt were associated with at least one animal, yet why were cats given such special treatment? The reason may be because the cat goddess of Egypt perfectly reflected the many benefits her animals gave to the people of the ancient world.
Because of the way ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were written, historians are not quite clear on how Bastet’s name was pronounced.
Many sources indicated that the final -t sound in female names was probably silent, so the goddess is often referred to as Bast or Best. Reconstructions from Coptic, meanwhile, show that by the 1st millennium BC her name may have been pronounced as Ubast or Ubaste.
This is particularly true since Bastet is known to have been worshipped in some form very early in Egyptian history.
A side effect of keeping both rodents and snakes away was a decrease in the spread of disease through the food supply. In time, Bastet was so closely associated with disease prevention that the stone used for medicinal ointment vials, alabaster, was named in her honor.
Worship of the goddess Bastet
Her earliest form was that of a lioness or lion-headed goddess. Similar to the lioness goddess Sekhmet, she was a protector.
However, both the form and function of Bastet evolved.
In the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070 – 712 BC) she began to be depicted more as a domestic feline than as a wild lioness.
The Goddess Bastet, was originally depicted as a lioness but by the first millennium B.C. Bastet was almost exclusively depicted as a domesticated cat. Only in some parts of the Nile Delta did she retain the lioness form, although domestic cats were still associated with her cult there.
As Bastet became more closely associated with domestic cats in her imagery, she also took more of their features into her domain.
They also chased away snakes and other vermin. Since Ra’s greatest adversary was a snake, it was easy to imagine Bastet driving it away as his protector.
Bastet even assumed the role of mother goddess based on the fertility and maternal instinct of domestic cats.
Because of Bastet, cats were revered in ancient Egypt. In reality, however, the goddess was worthy of reverence for her cats and not the other way around.
