Bastet: A Egyptian Mythology Sleep Story

Full transcript

At dusk, the light in the delta turns the color of honey, and in the last of it stands Bastet, cut from pale alabaster, a slender woman's body carrying the narrow head of a cat, the chin raised, the ears turned a little forward as though she has caught some small sound out on the water. In her hand, she carries an aegis, a broad collar of beaten metal, and set into it, small and strange upon so still a figure, is the face of a lioness. That lioness is the older face. Before she was the cat of the delta, she was a fury whose claws guarded the sun, and how that fire came to lie down on a warm floor is the whole of tonight's story.

If these ancient stories help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you at bedtime. The priests move quietly through the grove at Bubastis, trimming the lamps, and the small flames throw a wavering gold across the stone. The crowns of the trees stand so tall that the roof of the shrine is already in shadow, while the lamps beneath it are barely lit, and beyond the last of them, the water lies dark on three of the temple's four sides, still and waiting, holding what remains of the sky.

In her other hand, the goddess holds a sistrum, the sacred rattle of the temple, its loose disks quiet on their rods, and everything about her at this hour argues for the gentleness the delta believes in. Protector of the northern land, mother of the household, patient, curled into the shape of a house cat that has come in from the cold. This is a true face. It is only not the first one, and the grove she stands in is the last short stretch of a road that runs back three thousand years into a country of open ground and heavy jaws.

Watch the lamplight climb the goddess as the priest lifts his lamp and see how it finds her name first, cut into the base of the image in the old signs. There, among the marks, is a small jar with a sealed mouth, the shape the scribes used to write the sound that begins her name. The cutting is deep and unhurried. Whoever made it took his time. Yet what the name once truly meant lies further down than the lamplight reaches, blurred by the long centuries, until even the priests who tended her could not have spoken it with certainty.

They cut it into the stone all the same and shook the sistrum above it and went on serving a goddess whose name they could no longer translate, the way a family goes on using a word handed down from a grandmother without ever asking what she meant by it. For now, let it be enough that the sign at her feet keeps its counsel and that the calm face above it is not the only face she has worn. Between the lioness with fire in her breath and the small cat adored by the delta, there lies a puzzle of country as much as of character.

The lion was never a creature of this water. She belonged to the desert margin, to the gravel and the thorn scrub where the cultivation gives out, to the hour before dawn when a herdsman counts his animals twice and keeps the fire high. Yet here she stands in the wettest province of Egypt in a spreading fan of channels and reed beds and fish traps where a lion would find nothing to hunt and nowhere dry to lie down. The delta did not borrow a neighbor's beast to be its chief goddess. It kept one it already had and went on keeping her long after her shape had stopped matching the ground beneath it.

Why a marsh country should have carried a desert predator at the head of its worship is a thing no priest ever wrote down, and the answer is not in the grove at all. It waits in a drier and far older Egypt at the place where the road she traveled first began. That road begins in the third millennium before the Common Era, in an Egypt so old that even the great pyramids were not yet dreamed. There, the short form of her name appears first, simply Bast, spoken and written in the days of the Second Dynasty, around two thousand eight hundred and ninety years before the Common Era.

She does not arrive as a cat. She arrives as a lioness. In the earliest images, she is a fierce lioness or a woman with a lioness head, her jaw heavy, her gaze without mercy, a creature of the open country where the great cats hunted at dawn and dusk. Even then, she was a protector. Her name was inscribed on seals and cut into stone vessels, the small precious objects that men wished to place under a divine guard. To carry her name was to carry a shield, for she was understood from the first as a power that defended, that stood between the vulnerable and the things that would harm them.

Where she came from before Egypt named her is not certain. Some have suggested that her roots lay to the south in Nubia, and that she came down the river into the delta as many things and many peoples did. That thread is held loosely here, a possibility rather than a fact, for the earliest ages keep few clear records, and much of what is said of them must be spoken with care. Follow her name forward a little out of those first shadowy dynasties and into the age of the pyramid builders, and it does not vanish.

It rises. In the tombs of kings, her name was set among the treasures gathered for the journey beyond death. Seals and stone vessels bearing the name of Bast were found in the burial goods of the Pharaoh Khafre, whose likeness some believe still gazes out from the face of the Great Sphinx, and in the goods of the later King Nyuserra Ini. Khafre belonged to the fourth dynasty and Nyuserra to the fifth, so that across the twenty-sixth century and the twenty-fifth, in the middle stretch of the third millennium before the Common Era, she stands already as a guardian of kings, a lioness watching over the most powerful men who had ever lived along the Nile and over their long sleep in the stone.

She did not stand alone in this fierce work. In that early age, her lioness form was a form she shared, for Egypt knew several great cats among its goddesses. There was Shesmetet, another lioness power older than memory, whose name the priests kept without explaining. There was Pakhet, the tearer, who hunted the dry wadis where the desert road climbs away from the barley. And there was Sekhmet, whose shadow would fall longest across this story. To look upon a lioness goddess in those days was not always to know at once which one you faced, for they wore the same terrible shape, the same wide shoulders and unblinking eyes, and Bast belonged to that company as one hunter belongs to a pride.

Behind that guardianship of kings, there stood an office, and the office had a name older than any of the men she watched over. She was the Eye of Ra. In the old telling, Bastet was a daughter of the sun god Ra, and among the goddesses, she was counted as one who could become his eye, that fierce and protective power which goes out from the sun to defend it. She was not alone in this either. Hathor could be the eye, and Sekhmet, and Isis, and Mut, and Tefnut, and Rettawi, and Menhit. All of them, at one time or another, carried that blazing office.

The Eye of Ra was not a thing that watched from a distance. It was a force sent out, a daughter loosed from the face of her father to burn away whatever threatened him. Think of the sun as a king and of his enemies gathering at the rim of the world in the dark hours, the serpents and the powers of chaos that pressed against the edges of creation. The eye was the answer to them. It went out ahead of the god, a lioness of pure heat and fury, and it drove back the darkness so that the sun could rise again unbroken.

To be the eye was to be the sharpest edge of divine defense, beautiful and dangerous in the same breath. And Bastet, in her lioness days, was exactly this. Not a comfort by the hearth, but a weapon held in the hand of the sky. Because she guarded the sun, she also guarded the land beneath it, and above all, she guarded its northern half. She was the protector of Lower Egypt, the wide green country where the river gives up its single channel and opens into a fan of slow branches, each one carrying its silt and its boats down toward the salt.

To protect that land was to protect the one who ruled it, and to protect the king was to protect Ra himself, for the pharaoh was the living presence of the sun among his people. So the lines of her guardianship ran upward like a chain of light. The Delta, the king, the sun god. A lioness at the bottom of that chain held the whole of it steady, and this is why her name lay so easily among the treasures of dead kings. A fierce companion set to watch over them in the dark. The Delta was not the only country that kept a lioness, and it did not keep the most terrible of them.

Upstream, where the valley makes its last narrow run and then opens its hand into the marshland, at the very hinge of the two lands, stood the old capital of Memphis. Its white walls lay along the western bank, and behind them, the desert rose in a long, pale shelf crowded with the tombs of the ancestors so that a man might walk out of the wet, black fields and onto bare, burning stone before his shadow had shifted. That city housed a lioness of its own. Her sanctuary stood within the precinct of the craftsman god, among workshops where copper was hammered thin and granite was worked with sand and patience.

And the gifts carried to her were not the gifts carried to a guardian of cradles. They were the gifts of people who had already felt what she could do. The sick were carried to her when a fever moved through a quarter and would not lift. Kings came to her before they went out to war, asking that her heat go before them. Even the priests who served her daily spoke her name carefully, the way a man speaks near a sleeping animal he has fed but never tamed. That lioness was Sekhmet, the powerful one, and where Bast in her fierce days was a lioness set to guard, Sekhmet was the lioness set to destroy.

Her breath was the hot wind that comes off the desert in the dry months, the wind that dries the throat and cracks the lip and carries fine sand into every closed room. That wind was understood as her exhalation, the warm and pitiless air of a goddess who did not tire. She was a warrior above all the warrior gods, and she was also a healer, and the two were never separate. Those who studied the body and its long list of ailments served her as her priests, because the power that sends a plague across the land is the only power with the authority to call it back.

She was, like Bastet, an Eye of Ra, one of those daughters of the sun loosed to burn away his enemies. She was wife to Ptah, the great craftsman god of Memphis, and mother to Nefertum, the young god who rose each morning as a blue lotus from the still water. So Sekhmet stood at the center of a family and a city, honored, feared, and needed, and yet her power was of a single terrible kind. Where Bastet could be spoken of as gentle, Sekhmet was rarely gentle at all. She was the heat without the shade.

Here, the tradition does something that can seem strange to those who meet it for the first time. It takes these two lionesses, the burning one and the guarding one, and it binds them into a single household. The threads that tie them are everywhere once a person looks for them. Both were Eye of Ra, and both were called Daughter of the Sun, so they were sisters before they were anything else. Both were named Consort of Ptah of Memphis, so they shared a husband. Both were claimed as the mother of the lion-headed Maahes, so they shared a son.

And Egypt, which liked its powers arranged in matched pairs as it liked its crowns and its two lands in matched pairs, gave each of them her own ground within the northern country, Sekhmet at Memphis, where the valley ends and the desert cliff looks down upon the workshops of the stonecutters, and Bastet away to the east among the channels where the water spreads out and the boats go down toward the sea. The dry lioness stood at the head of the Delta and the green lioness in the heart of it, the two of them holding the northern land between them the way the two lands were always spoken of together and never singly.

Over time, the two names begin to lean upon one another in the temple texts until they are written almost in one breath, the same goddess greeted by both, and no scribe of any dynasty pauses to explain how this came about or when. The stone itself invited that folding. A carved lioness carries no label in her body. Her name lived in the line of hieroglyphs beside her, and when the inscription was worn away or never cut at all, what remained was simply a great cat available to whoever came to pray.

So the same seated figure could be greeted as Sekhmet in one town and as Bastet in another, and the priests, who were not troubled by this, learned to speak of faces and aspects rather than of rival goddesses. Where the boundary between two powers is only a line of writing, the powers themselves drift together, and the story that best explains what it means for a lioness to be too hot and to be cooled belongs first to Sekhmet. It is an old myth, and it is told here with the distance that old and heavy things deserve.

Ra, the sun god, had grown aged in his long rule over gods and mortals, and among humankind there rose a plot against him, a muttering and a scheming among people who no longer feared their maker. Ra took counsel with the elder gods, and the judgment fell that the rebellion must be answered. So he loosed his eye upon the world in the form of Sekhmet, and she went out across the land as fire goes out across dry reeds. What followed, the tradition records without relish and without excuse. The lioness struck down the guilty, and then she did not stop.

The taste of the work was upon her, and she waded on through the fields and the villages until the very river was said to run dark, until it seemed she would not leave a single living soul upon the earth. Ra, looking down, found that he had wished to punish and not to end the world. He wished to call his daughter home, but she was past all calling. A goddess loosed cannot be gathered up again by a word. So the god turned to cleverness where strength had failed. Here the tellings part, and honesty asks that both roads be walked.

In the account most often repeated, Ra ordered great quantities of beer to be brewed, seven thousand jars by some countings, and had it dyed with red ochre from the quarries until it took on the color of blood. In the night, this red beer was poured out across the fields where Sekhmet would pass at dawn until it lay in shining pools that mirrored the reddening sky. When the lioness came down at first light, still seeking the slaughter, she saw the flooded ground and believed it to be exactly what she craved.

She stooped and drank, and drank deeply, and the beer was strong. The heat in her softened into a heavy warmth. Her eyes grew slow. The fury drained out of her limbs, and she forgot the hunt, and she came home at last to her father, calm and quieted, no longer the destroyer, but the daughter. In this ending, the deception is a mercy, and the world is spared by a trick that harms no one. But there is another road the story can take, and the tradition preserves it rather than smoothing it away.

In that version, the goddess, once the weight of the beer had worn out of her, understood that she had been deceived. She had been turned aside from her purpose by a cup and a lie, and this offended her. In her displeasure, she left Egypt altogether and withdrew into the far southern lands, taking her heat and her light with her. And here is the quiet cost of her leaving. She was the eye of the sun, and when the eye departs, the sun is diminished. The days lost some measure of their strength.

The land felt the absence of its fiercest daughter, and the balance of things tilted. It fell to Thoth, the god of wisdom and of patient words, to go after her into the wilderness. He did not fight her, for no one could. He reasoned with her and told her stories and coaxed and flattered and soothed until at last her anger cooled of its own weight, and she consented to come home. In this ending, the world is not saved by beer, but by conversation, and the goddess returns, not tricked, but persuaded.

Both endings were held to be true in the way that myths permit many truths to stand together in the same temple, and both carry the same shape at their heart. Each is a story about a rage that had to be cooled and about a household of gods that could neither command that cooling nor do without it. Whether the cure was a cup poured out in the dark or a voice speaking patiently in the southern wilderness, the daughter who came home was the daughter who had gone out, unbroken and undivided, only quieter.

Egypt told that shape over and over in one telling after another, until at last it found a way to tell the whole of it in a single image. That image is small enough to hold in the hand. It speaks of a lioness ablaze with wrath, her whole body a furnace, pacing and unquiet, too hot for any dwelling to hold. And it tells how she came at last to the water of the temple lake and entered it, and how the water received her heat. Where she had been fire, she became cool. Where she had been vast and terrible, she drew inward and grew small.

And when she rose from the water, she was no longer a lioness, but a cat, a gentle creature that walked into the temple and settled there and stayed. The rage did not vanish from the world. It was quenched and changed, folded down into a shape that could live among people without burning them. This is not merely a pretty tale set apart from the stones of Egypt. It is written into the very ground on which the temples of the lioness goddesses were built. That dark water lying about the shrine at Bubastis on three of its four sides was no ornament and no accident of the flood.

It had a name. It was an Isheru, an artificial lake cut in a long crescent about the holy place, and it was not unique to her. The same still water lay around the temple of Mut at Karnak in the great southern city of Thebes, and it was a feature the Egyptians gave to the temples of their lioness powers as a kind of rule, to Mut, to Tefnut, to Hathor, to Sekhmet, and to Bastet. The lake was the cool that answered the heat. It was the myth made into architecture, the water always present at the feet of the burning goddess, so that her fury might always have somewhere to go.

When the pilgrims looked upon that lake lying calm around the shrine, they were looking at the very thing that had turned a lioness into a cat, standing there in earth and water for anyone to see. Water and stone could be arranged around a goddess by the hands of builders. A family could not, and the family of the goddess of Bubastis, like so much in this tradition, refuses to sit entirely still. She was named the consort of Ptah, the creator god of Memphis, that ancient and dignified figure who was thought to have made the world in a manner unlike the other makers.

Ptah did not shape creation from mud or from his own body. He was said to have made it through his heart and his tongue, conceiving each thing in his mind and then speaking it into being, so that thought and word together brought the cosmos out of the silence. He was the patron of the craftsmen and the architects, of every hand that cuts stone and every mind that plans a wall, and he was shown as a man wrapped close in a tight shroud, his skin the green of new growth, holding before him a single tall scepter that joined together the was of power, the ankh of life, and the djed of endurance.

To be named the consort of such a god was to be drawn into the oldest dignity of Memphis, into the household of the one who thought the world. With Ptah, the tradition gives Bastet a son, and his name was Maahes, the lion-headed lord of war. He was a fierce protector, a devourer of the guilty, a god who kept the innocent and punished the treaty-breaker, and in his shape one sees again the old lion's strength running down through the generations. Yet honesty requires the admission that his parentage will not hold to one telling.

In some places Maahes is called the son of Bastet, and in others he is called the son of Sekhmet. The priests of the Delta claimed him for the goddess whose city fed them, and the priests of Memphis claimed him for the goddess whose city fed them, and each carved the claim in stone that has outlasted the argument. It is less a contradiction than the ordinary friction of two towns telling the same story about their own. Nor is her own descent any more settled. Most often she is named a daughter of Ra, born of the sun to serve as his eye and his guardian, and this is the parentage that best fits her fiery beginnings.

But there is at least one account that gives her instead to Isis, the great mother of the gods, weaving her into a different strand of the divine family. The tradition did not trouble itself to choose. A goddess worshiped across two thousand years and the length of a river gathers many genealogies to herself, and the tellers were content to let her be daughter of the sun in one temple and daughter of Isis in another, without ever feeling the need to reconcile the two. And it is across those same two thousand years that the greatest change of all came upon her, though no reign records it and no decree announced it.

It happened at the pace of silt, a little more laid down with every flood until the field stands where the water used to run, and no one can say which season did it. In the earliest ages, she was a lioness and nothing softer. But as the New Kingdom rose, something shifted in the houses and the streets of Egypt, and it shifted her with it. The domestic cat, the small hunter that kept the granaries clear of mice and the thresholds clear of snakes, was becoming beloved as never before. Cat-shaped ornaments began to appear among the fine things people owned.

The little creature that had once merely been useful became cherished, admitted to the household and the affections of the family. And as the living cat rose in the hearts of the people, the goddess who wore the feline shape was drawn gently toward the same softening. The lioness on the temple wall began over generations to become a cat. The very writing of her name records this quiet turning. In the older days, she was Bast, a short and closed word. But the scribes of the New Kingdom and the ages after it did a small thing with the sound of it.

They added a feminine ending, a suffix that gave the world the form still used, Bastet. And it is thought they did so to press upon the final sound, to insist that the silent T at the end of her name be heard and honored rather than swallowed. It is a tiny act of care, a scribe leaning on a letter, and yet in it one can feel the whole change of her nature, the fierce short name lengthening and gentling on the tongue just as the goddess herself was lengthening and gentling in the mind. The tradition may even have preferred that the sense of the name stay dark.

The gods of Egypt often carried names that were euphemisms or guarded secrets, veils drawn over a power too great to be spoken plainly, and hers may well have been such a veil. There is a further difficulty besides. Even the word Bastet is only a convention agreed among scholars. One reconstruction among several of an old written form whose vowels the scribes never troubled to record since the living voice supplied them. To speak her name at all is to speak a careful guess offered across the silence of the ages at a sound the Delta once knew and has long since let fall quiet.

Yet uncertainty is not the same as silence, and scholars have listened hard to the name and offered their readings of it. One tradition carried in the work of Stephen Quirke hears in Bastet the idea of the ointment jar. In this reading, her name is bound to that sign at her feet, the hieroglyph bvrn, which is the picture of a sealed vessel for holding oils and unguents so that her name would carry the sense of she of the ointment jar. There is a quiet fittingness in it, for the fine oils of Egypt were not luxuries alone.

They were medicine and protection rubbed into the skin against the harshness of the sun and the wind and the small sicknesses of daily life poured out in the rites that guarded the living and prepared the dead. A goddess whose very name held a jar of protective ointment would be a goddess of exactly the sheltering care the people sought from her. Another scholar, James Allen, hears the name differently. He reads it not as a thing but as a belonging, a form the Egyptians used often in which a name is built from a place and means simply the one who comes from there.

In his reading, Bastet is a nisba drawn from a place called Baset, and her name means she of Baset, the goddess of that town before she was anything larger. Where Quirke finds an object rich with meaning, Allen finds a map. Both may be partly right, and neither can be proven over the other, for the sound and the sense have traveled too far down the ages to be recovered whole. The sound itself has drifted as much as the meaning. When Allen reaches back toward the oldest pronunciation, he does not arrive at Bastet at all, but at something closer to Buistit, a shape strange to our ears, full of a soft catch in the throat that the later language let fall away.

As the centuries turned and the first millennium before our era came on, that older sound had worn down toward Ubaste, and by the time the Coptic tongue was spoken in the valley, it had become Ubast, gentler still. So the name we say is only the last visible stone of a long path, and behind it stand older sounds, each one the true name in its own age and each one now half lost. There is one small inheritance from that name that outlasted the goddess and travels quietly in speech even now.

The pale, translucent stone that the Egyptians loved for carving, the soft, glowing stone from which so many of her own images were made, is called alabaster, and it is thought by some that this very word came down to us through the Greek from her name and from the city that bore it. If that descent is true, then every time the word is spoken, in places that have never heard of Egypt, a faint echo of the Delta goddess is carried along inside it, unrecognized, worn smooth as a river stone, and still somehow hers.

By slow degrees then, the fierce short name softened into the long one, and the lioness on the wall softened into the cat at the hearth, and there came at last an age when the change was all but complete. Scholars who have measured the turning, Turner and Bateson among them, place its center in the years of the twenty-second dynasty, in the span of roughly nine hundred and forty-five to seven hundred and fifteen years before our era. Before that stretch of time she had been, in the main, a lioness.

After it she was, in the main, a cat. The great predator of the desert edge had come indoors, had lain down by the grain jars and the sleeping children, and had let the sun warm her smaller shape. In the age the historians call the Third Intermediate Period, the change shows plainly in the images the people made. Where once the temple sculptors had raised the heavy-shouldered lioness, now they carved a domestic cat, sleek and self-possessed, sitting upright with its tail curled about its feet and its ears pricked toward some sound only it could hear.

And where they gave her a human body, it was a cat's head they set upon it now, not the broad mask of the lion. She became a slender woman standing straight and calm, with the fine narrow face of a house cat lifted above her shoulders, her eyes wide and steady, her whole bearing poised between the wild and the tame. Sometimes the makers did not give her a body at all. They venerated her as a cat's head alone, the sacred face on its own, needing nothing more to be known. And sometimes, most tenderly of all, they surrounded her with kittens.

They set the small creatures at her feet and against her sides, tumbling and climbing and pressing close to her. And in these images, she is no longer any kind of warrior. She is a mother among her young, watchful and unhurried, and the whole meaning of her has come to rest in that gathered, guarding softness. This is the Bastet whom the households of Egypt came to love, and the roles that gathered around her in these later ages were roles of shelter and of nearness rather than of battle.

She had become a goddess of the small, close things that a family cares about most. Because the cat brought forth its litters so easily and so often, she was linked with fertility and with the mystery of new life, and women who hoped for children or who carried them turned to her. She watched over pregnancy and over the dangerous hour of childbirth when a mother and her infant stood together at a threshold that not all crossed safely. And to have the cat goddess near was to hope that both would come through into the light.

Once the child was born, she did not leave. The good mother among her kittens was the very image of the protection a household wanted over its own children, and so she stayed close to the cradle and the nursery in the imagination of the people. She was thought to guard against the things that crept in to harm the young and the weak, against contagious disease that could pass unseen from body to body through a crowded house, and against the evil spirits that were believed to gather in the dark and to prey upon the vulnerable.

She was a keeper of the doorway of the home in the widest sense, turning back sickness and malice as a real cat turns back the vermin at the grain. Her finished images carry the signs of who she had become, and the sistrum in her hand is the first of them. That frame of metal strung with loose disks was not an ornament but an instrument, shaken in the rites so that its dry, bright chiming filled the sanctuary. And the sound itself was held to please the goddess and to drive off what wished her worshipers harm.

To put it in her hand was to name her a power of music and dance and festival, of the lighter and brighter kinds of devotion. The aegis she carries in the other hand is the answering sign, the wide protective collar that was also fixed at the prow of a sacred barge to guard it on the water. Hers is surmounted by that lioness face so that even at her gentlest, the old fierce head goes before her like a small shield, the warrior remembered inside the mother. Her figures were carved again and again from that pale luminous alabaster, the soft stone that seemed almost to hold light within it, the stone whose very name may whisper hers.

Set in a niche in a house of mud brick, such a figure would take the lamplight and give a little of it back so that in a dark room she seemed faintly lit from inside. The warrior, the healer, the musician, the mother, all of them were present in that one slender shape with the cat's calm face. And the woman who set her on the ledge above the sleeping mats was not choosing among them. She was calling on the whole of the goddess at once and expecting the whole of her to answer. The depth of that love is easiest to read not in the temples at all, but in the living cats that moved through the houses and the streets of Egypt, for the goddess was honored through her small earthly kin.

The cat was cherished first for what it did. In a land that lived by its granaries, the mice and the rats that gnawed into the stored wheat were a constant quiet enemy, and the cat that hunted them through the night was worth more than its weight in the grain it saved. Beyond the vermin there were the snakes, and against these the cat was braver still. It would face the serpents that slid in toward the sleeping household, and it would face even the cobra, rearing and hooded and full of death, and it would kill what a grown man feared to touch.

A creature that stood between the family and the cobra in the dark was not merely useful. it was a small guardian sent, it must have seemed, by the guardian goddess herself. So the cat rose in honor until it lived, in some houses, almost as a member of the family. The cats of the wealthy and the royal might be dressed in golden jewelry, fitted with rings and collars of worked gold, and they were permitted to eat from the household plate, taking their food beside the people as though they sat among equals.

This was no idle pampering in the eyes of the Egyptians. It was reverence for a creature touched by the divine, an honor paid to the living shape of Bastet as she walked among them, sleek and unbothered, accepting the devotion as her due. And when a cherished cat died, the grief was real, and it was deep. A household could fall into great mourning at the loss of its cat, and those who had the means did for the animal what they did for their own beloved dead. They had the small body embalmed with care, wrapped and preserved against the ages, and laid to rest in cemeteries kept for the purpose.

Scholars have reached for a way to make this plain, and Turner and Bateson describe the cat of ancient Egypt as a creature so bound up with the sacred that to harm it was to harm something holy, and to honor it was simply part of the settled order of the world, a beast hedged about with reverence as surely as any image kept within a shrine. If the cat was holy everywhere in Egypt, there was one place above all others where its holiness gathered and had its home. Following the river north out of the narrow valley and into the flat country where the branches of the Nile go their separate ways toward the sea, one came at last to the city that belonged to her by name.

The Egyptians called it Per-Bastet, which means the House of Bastet, the dwelling of the goddess made into a city of the living, and it was the capital of its own nome, its own province of the northern land, seated upon the river and grown great upon her worship. The name of the place traveled outward through other tongues, as her own name had. The Greeks who came to see it shaped the old sound to their own mouths and wrote it Bubastis, and by that form it entered the books of the wider world.

But the name kept here is the one the Delta itself used, Bubastis, the House of the Goddess. It reached even into the scriptures of another people, for in the Book of Ezekiel the town is named in Hebrew as Pi-beseth, set down among the cities of Egypt by a prophet who never saw the cat goddess yet knew the name of her house. So the dwelling of Bastet was known under one form of its name or another far beyond the Delta that cradled it, carried in Greek and in Hebrew into memories that outlived the city itself.

Its ruins lie now in the flat country at the edge of the town of Zagazig, low mounds and broken stone where a great city once stood quiet under the same sun. But in its living centuries, it was the beating heart of her cult, the chief seat of her worship in all the land, the place to which her devotion flowed as the waters flow to the sea. And it was more than a place of prayer. It became the great gathering ground of the sacred dead who wore her shape, the principal resting place of the cat mummies of Egypt, the ground into which across the generations the honored bodies of countless cats were carried and laid down in her keeping.

The house of Bastet was a house for the living goddess and for her small departed children alike, and the number of them who came at last to rest in that soil would grow over the long ages of her worship past anything a single mind can easily hold. We know the shape of that house because a stranger once walked its channels and wrote down what he saw. In the fifth century before the common era, a Greek from the coast of Asia came south into Egypt to look upon its wonders and to set them down in careful prose.

His name was Herodotus, and he moved through the old land as a curious guest moves through a house far larger and far older than his own, measuring, questioning, listening to the priests, recording what he was told and what his own eyes confirmed. When he came at last to Bubastis, he found there a temple that he judged worth describing above almost all the others, not for its size, for he freely said that larger and costlier temples stood elsewhere, but for the sheer pleasure the sight of it gave.

What struck him first was that the temple seemed to stand upon an island, though it had not always been so. Two separate channels had been drawn from the Nile, and these ran round the sacred ground on opposite sides, each about a hundred feet across, each shaded along its banks by trees that leaned toward the water. The channels did not meet. They flowed up to the temple from either hand and stopped short so that a mouth of land was left between them, and by that mouth alone the temple was joined to the city.

Everywhere else, the water lay about it, still and green and cool, holding the goddess in a bright ring. There was a further thing that Herodotus noticed, and it changed how the whole place was seen. Over the long generations, the city of Bubastis had been raised. Its streets and its houses had been built up higher and higher, mound upon mound, until the level of the living town stood well above the level of the temple, for the temple had been left low just as it had first been set. The result was that a visitor did not look up at the house of the goddess as one looks up at a thing set on a hill.

A visitor looked down into it. From the raised rim of the city, from the streets and the walls, the eye fell across and into the sacred enclosure, and the whole of it lay open below like a green bowl held in the hands of the town. Around that low and watered ground ran a wall of stone, and the stone had been carved. Figures stood upon it, cut by patient hands, so that the boundary of the holy place was itself a kind of long, silent telling, a procession in relief that circled the goddess and kept her.

And within the wall, within the ring of carved stone and the wider ring of still water, there grew a grove. The trees of it were very tall, taller than the shrine they sheltered, and they stood close about the great house at the center where the image of Bastet was kept. So the goddess sat at the heart of three enclosures, one of leaf, one of stone, and one of water, hidden and guarded and cool, while the loud, bright city looked down from above upon the green quiet that held her. Herodotus was a man who liked a measurement, and he gave the temple its dimensions in the plain terms of his own world.

The sacred building was square, he said, and each of its sides ran a full furlong so that the four walls together enclosed a great and even space, a perfect figure laid down upon the earth. From the front of that square, a road ran out, and the road too he measured. It was paved with stone. It stretched some three furlongs in length, and it was broad, nearly four hundred feet from side to side, a processional way wide enough for a whole festival to pour along it without crowding. On either hand, it was bordered by trees grown so tall that they seemed to the Greek to reach toward the sky, a double colonnade of living wood that threw its shade across the stone.

These are his figures, and it is best to hold them as his, the report of one traveler writing down what he paced and what he was told. Yet even as his figures, they let the mind walk. The road led eastward out from the low green temple of the cat goddess, running straight through the marketplace of the city where the trade and the talk of Bubastis gathered, and on toward another sacred house, the temple that the Greeks named for Hermes, their own name laid over an Egyptian god as they were fond of doing.

So the way of the goddess did not stand apart from the ordinary life of the town. It ran through the very middle of it, through the stalls and the voices of the market, a paved and shaded river of stone along which the people moved between one holy place and another. To walk it in the imagination is to pass under those tall trees in the eastern light, with the water of the channels bright on one side and the raised streets of the city on the other, going slowly toward the house where the image waited in her grove.

Along that road, once in the turning of every year, came the greatest crowd that Herodotus knew of anywhere in Egypt. He set down the festival of Bubastis as the most important and the most beloved of all the festivals of that land, greater in its throngs and its gladness than any other gathering he had heard named. To it the people came not by the hundred and not by the thousand, but, in his reckoning, by the hundreds of thousands. About seven hundred thousand visitors, he wrote, men and women together, made their way to the city for the feast.

The children alone were left behind, uncounted and absent from the number, so that what filled the ships and the roads was a gathering of grown men and grown women drawn from across the country to the house of the cat. They came chiefly by water, for the Nile was the great road of Egypt, and the sight of their coming was itself part of the festival. Barges and river craft of every description floated down the stream, crowded to the rails, laden with people who had left their towns and their fields to travel to the goddess.

On the boats the women made music. They took up instruments and shook them. They sang, they clapped, and some of them rose and danced upon the decks as the current carried them north. From vessel to vessel, the sound went out across the water, singing, answering, singing, so that the whole river seemed to move in one long glad procession toward Bubastis. A stream of song laid upon the stream of the Nile. When the ships reached the city and the people came ashore, the feast that followed was a great and open pouring out of devotion.

Sacrifices were made in prodigious number, offerings heaped up before the goddess in quantities to match the size of the crowd, and wine was drunk. More wine, Herodotus was given to understand, than in all the rest of the year besides. This was not disorder for its own sake, though to a stranger it might have looked like nothing else. It belonged to an old pattern in the worship of the lioness goddesses of Egypt, the feasts that were kept in deliberate drunkenness, the sacred loosening of the senses that was meant to soothe a fierce divine heart and to keep the dangerous power of the goddess turned toward mercy.

To drink deep at Bubastis was to take part in a rite far older than the wine, a yearly cooling of the lioness within the cat, an act of gladness offered up so that the goddess might remain the gentle mother and not the burning eye. The festival that the Greek traveler watched in his own century was already ancient when he came to it, and the land had kept its own witnesses to that. Long before Herodotus, in the years of the New Kingdom, the feast at Bubastis was set down in the records of Egypt as a thing already established and honored.

Among the stones that remember it is a block statue, one of those square compact figures in which a seated man is carved as though wrapped and folded into a single mass of stone, his knees drawn up, his body a quiet cube from which the head looks out. This one belonged to a man named Neferka, a wab priest of Sekhmet, a servant of the burning sister of the gentle goddess, and he lived in the eighteenth dynasty around fourteen centuries before the common era. Upon his statue, it is recorded that the king himself, Amenhotep III, came to the festival of Bubastis and there made great offerings to the goddess.

So the seven hundred thousand of Herodotus did not gather at a young shrine. They gathered where kings had already knelt, where a pharaoh remembered as one of the mightiest of his line had come in person to lay down his gifts before the cat, and where a priest of the lioness had thought it worth carving into hard stone that he had seen it done. The devotion ran back through the dynasties like the road ran back through the market. One age opening onto another, the same goddess receiving the same reverence under changing kings, and it ran forward as well into ages that Neferka could not have foreseen.

Long after the New Kingdom had passed, the land came under the rule of Greeks, the line of the Ptolemies who held Egypt for the better part of three centuries. These newcomers did not cast down the old goddess. They did as travelers had done before them and found in their own gods the likeness of hers. Bastet they matched with Artemis, the huntress of their own sky, the maiden of wild things and of the moon. And so the cat goddess of the Delta took on a second face in Greek eyes. They called her also by a plainer name that told exactly what they saw.

They called her Ailuros, which in their tongue means simply the cat. Under Greek rule, her oracle at Bubastis grew in fame, and her shrine drew both the native people of Egypt and the strangers who had come to live among them, so that the house of the cat gathered pilgrims of two worlds at once, and her voice was sought by mouths that spoke a language she had never needed. Yet for all the crowds of the living, the deepest strangeness of Bubastis and of the places like it lay underground in what the goddess gathered to herself when the singing was over.

For the cat that was holy in life did not cease to be holy in death, and the land that revered the living animal buried the dead one in numbers that stagger the mind that tries to hold them. When the temple of Bastet at Bubastis was at last dug into by later hands, the earth gave up its long secret. More than three hundred thousand mummified cats were found there. Three hundred thousand small wrapped bodies laid down in her keeping, an assembly of the sacred dead greater than the living throng of any single feast.

Nor was Bubastis alone in this. The dead cats of Egypt gathered in more than one holy ground. At Saqqara, in the great field of tombs upon the desert shelf above Memphis, there was a place the excavators came to call the Bubasteion, a precinct given over to the goddess and to her animals, and there too the cats were buried in their multitudes. At Speos Artemidos, the shrine hollowed into the cliff face above the eastern desert road, where Pakhet the tearer had hunted since the earliest ages and where the Greeks later saw their own Artemis looking out at them, the same keeping was practiced, the same small bodies laid up in the rock.

Across the land, wherever a cat goddess was honored, the ground beneath her houses filled slowly with the wrapped and the embalmed, a hidden population of the reverent dead. The scale of it broke upon the modern world almost by accident. In the year eighteen hundred and eighty-eight at Beni Hasan, a farmer working the ground uncovered a burial place of cats, and it was not a grave of hundreds but of hundreds of thousands, a whole necropolis of the animals packed into the earth, generation upon generation of them brought to that spot and laid down.

What had been an act of quiet piety, repeated one small body at a time across uncounted years, revealed itself all at once as one of the vastest gatherings of a single creature that any land had ever made in the name of a god. When later students bent over these countless dead and looked closely at the bones within the wrappings, they learned something of the creatures themselves. Among the mummified cats taken from the ground at Giza, the most common by far was the African wild cat, the tawny hunter that scholars name Felis lybica, the very animal from which the tame cats of the households had been drawn.

After it, less often but still present in the sacred multitude, came the jungle cat, the larger, longer-legged Felis chaus of the reeds and the marsh edges. So the wrapped dead were not one kind only. They were a gathering of the feline tribe of Egypt, the small wild hunter of the desert margins chief among them, laid up by the hundreds of thousands in the houses of the goddess who wore their shape, waiting in the dark of the earth through all the ages that followed. That hidden population of the earth raises a question that the sober students of these things have long turned over, and it must be spoken with care, for it is speculation and not settled fact.

The numbers are so vast, hundreds of thousands in a single field, millions across the whole of the land, that some scholars have wondered whether so many cats could have come from the households and the streets alone. They have asked whether the animals were bred for the purpose, raised in their multitudes near the temples, brought into the world already promised to the goddess and to the wrappings that would carry them into her keeping. It is a careful guess and no more, yet it opens onto a whole quiet world of work.

For if the cats were raised so, then behind the calm face of the temple, there must have stood a long and patient trade. Someone had to feed the gathered animals, and grain had to come from the fields to do it. Someone had to gather the oils that anointed the small bodies and the resins that preserved them, gums and balms that did not all grow in the delta and had to be carried in from other lands along the old roads of commerce. The wrapping of a single sacred cat done well drew upon the harvest of farmers, the labor of embalmers, the reach of merchants who moved precious substances from far away.

What looked from the outside like a simple act of devotion may have rested upon a web of hands, each passing to the next the means by which a creature could be made ready for the dark. Whether or not the animals were bred in such numbers, the meaning laid upon them is not in doubt, and it stands written in the great book the Egyptians made to guide their dead. In the writings that later ages have called the Book of the Dead, among the spells and the pictures that lit the road through the underworld, the cat appears, and it is no small creature there.

In one of its images, the cat stands for Ra himself, for the sun and for the good that the sun pours out upon the living earth. The animal that dozed in the doorway of the house was drawn into the highest company of all, made a sign of the light that ripens the grain and warms the blood and holds back the night. This was no late fancy tacked on when the cat had already grown dear. The bond of the cat with the dead ran back into the deep years. Among the goods that the living laid beside their dead as far back as the twelfth dynasty, the bones of cats have been found, small skeletons set among the furnishings of the tomb, companions carried down into the ground long before the great necropolises of Bubastis and Beni Hasan were filled.

So the animal that had kept its watch at the threshold of the house was given a threshold of its own to keep, and it went down into the earth still working, still a little piece of the sun carried into a place the sun does not reach, so that in the deepest dark something warm should go on standing guard. And here at the far end of the long road that led from the desert lioness to the wrapped cat in the tomb, the puzzle set down at the beginning may quietly be answered. It was never the ground that made her.

What she was did not depend on whether she hunted the gravel margin or dozed in a reed-built house, and so the marsh country could keep its desert beast without any sense of contradiction at all. The answer the Egyptians reached is not that there were two goddesses wearing one borrowed shape. The answer is that there was one power and that the two faces were the two things that one power can do. For the sun that gives life is the same sun that can kill. The heat that ripens the field is the heat that cracks the dry earth and burns the traveler who lingers too long beneath it.

The Egyptians did not pretend these were separate. They set them side by side in the shape of a goddess and let her turn from one to the other. As Sekhmet, she was the fire, the breath of the desert wind, the fury that goes out against the enemies of the light, and the sickness that stalks the land. As Bastet, she was that same guarding strength grown quiet, the power that has done its killing in the dark and now lies warm across the threshold of the sleeping house. The lioness who walked into the temple lake was not exchanged for another creature.

She was a single force learning to rest, the same watchfulness that once tore at the throat of the wicked now folded into a small body by the hearth, its eyes half-closed, still open. The people who kept a cat and loved it saw as much in the one animal, and perhaps that is why they could believe such a doubling so easily. They watched the small hunter go rigid at the scent of the snake, saw the sudden killing spring, the ancient wildness wake for a heartbeat in the tame and dozing thing.

And they watched the same creature curl about her kittens and wash them and feed them, patient and unhurried, the very image of the good mother that their carvings made of the goddess with her litter at her feet. The vermin slayer and the nursing mother lived in one skin, and no household in the Delta ever thought the two of them needed reconciling. The rage that had been cooled in the lake had not been lost. It had only lain down, and it still watched over the sleeping house through the long hours of the night.

So the great names may be spoken once more now, softly, the way one folds a cloth that will not be needed again until morning. There is Bastet herself, with the sealed jar of ointment cut beneath her feet and her kittens climbing at her ankles. Daughter of the sun and eye of her father, who went out from his face as a blade and came home at last as a hearth. Let her be named and let her sleep. There is Sekhmet, her burning sister, the warrior and the physician together, whose sanctuary at Memphis stood among the copper workers and the granite dust, where the sick came to lie down through the night in the hope of waking with her mercy on them, and where the priests carved her likeness in dark stone, hundreds upon hundreds of her, seated and unsmiling, so that the offerings need never cease.

Her fire may bank low now, down to the last red under the ash. There is Ptah beside her, the maker of Memphis, the green shrouded craftsman who thought the world and then said it aloud, holding his one tall scepter of power and life and endurance in his wrapped hands. And there is Maahes, the lion sun, young lord of the knife and the storm, whom the Delta gave to Bastet and Memphis gave to Sekhmet, and who carries a lotus in the crook of his arm as though to prove that even a war god was born of a mother.

Let them stand quiet now in the dark, and let the argument between their two cities go unsettled forever. There is Herodotus, the traveler from over the sea, pacing out a road in a country not his own, with the dust of the market on his sandals, writing his figures down so carefully that we can still walk what he walked, so that ages after the last festival had ended, the music on the water would still be heard by someone. And there is the house of Bastet itself, the low green temple in its bowl of raised streets, its two channels of Nile water, its wall of carved figures, its grove of trees taller than the shrine they hid.

The city may be still now, and its water with it. The naming is done, and the sanctuary settles. Out in the grove, the priests have finished their round, and one by one the small flames are pinched out between wet fingers until only the last lamp is left burning beside the alabaster face. The channels lie black now on either hand, unmoving, with the tall trees standing in them upside down. The market road is empty from end to end, its paving still giving back the warmth it took from the day, and the raised streets above the temple show no light at all.

Nothing remains in the enclosure but the small sound of water moving against stone, and somewhere in that darkness a cat asleep, breathing slowly, one ear still turning at a sound. So let the delta go now, slowly and without haste. Beyond the temple wall, the river is running north under the stars with nothing on it, no sail, no oar, only the current, doing quietly what it has always done. Let the grove darken until the trees are one shape and not many. Imagine the temple of Bubastis and its festival crowds far behind you, its music and river noise no longer pressing on your thoughts.

In your mind, reach back and close an invisible door upon the sanctuary, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing the whole of it, the lioness and the lake and the long green grove, in quiet and order. Then see a single candle, its flame steady in the darkness. With a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the ancient stories carry you into the night.