Honouring Bast and Anubis

The August service at The Goddess House carried an Egyptian theme Bast (the cat headed Goddess associated with women and the moon) and Anubis (the jackal headed God associated with guiding the souls into the Underworld) were honoured.

Probably the most famous Egyptian Goddess after Isis, Bast (or Bastet) was believed to have originally been a Sun Goddess, but during the Greek rule of Egypt, she became associated with Artemis and the Moon.

The Goddess is very much alive

What a wonderful Goddessy week this week has been.  It commenced with the first devotional service for 2012 that was held on Tuesday night in honour of the Bone Mother and the Child of Winter.  Then I received notification on Wednesday that one of the anthologies I had submitted essays for, Unto Herself: A Devotional Anthology for Indepent Goddesses was now available to purchase.  This anthology contains my essay on the ancient Goddess Neith.  I am also eagerly awaiting notification as to when the other anthologies that I have also submitted essays to will be available, and have blogged about this on my Musings of a High Priestess blog.

Invocation to Bast

You move silently in the night
When shadows shift in dim moonlight
You lie in ambush biding your time
You are Bast, the cat divine

The enemies of Light and Ma'at
Are desperate not to cross your path
For while you move on velvet paws
You rend your foes with deadly claws

Only fools judge you by your size
Thinking you naught but the doom of mice
While you slay creatures of decay and strife
You are Bast, the Daughter of the Light

 

(Copyright © Avalon Sakti 2006)

Bast - a Solar and Lunar Goddess

Bast is a Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) Goddess worshiped at Bubastis in the Nile Delta where she was enthroned as the cat-headed incarnation of Isis, or alternately as the seated sacred cat. In ancient artwork, Bast is typically shown as a beautiful girl with the head of a cat.  she is commonly shown with black, white, yellow, or glowing skin, but often she is depicted fully in cat form.

Bast was said to be the daughter of Ra, though long after he created the primal Gods. She was originally a sun goddess, but after contact with the Greeks, she changed to a Moon Goddess, probably due to the Greeks associating her with Artemis, although some sources connect Bast with the ancient Egyptian Godddess Neith.  Like Artemis, Bast was a wild Goddess. To those who were in her favour, she gave great blessings, but her wrath was legendary and she was sometimes listed as one of Ra's avenging Deities who punish the sinful and the enemies of Egypt.

She was also the Egyptian Goddess of pleasure, music, dancing and joy, associated with cats, the rising sun, the moon, truth, enlightenment, lesbians, sexuality, physical pleasures, fertility, bounty, birth, plenty, the household and protector of the home, civilization, creation, music, dance, the arts, hemp, and the battler of serpents which attack the Sun God.  Bast also viewed as the beneficent side of the lioness Goddess Sekhmet.

Sopdet, Egyptian Goddess of the New Year

With the new calendar year fast approaching, now is the time that many of us start to contemplate a fresh start and new beginnings.  To the ancient Egyptians, the Goddess who marked the coming of the new year was Sopdet ("skilled woman"), or Sothis, who is more commonly personified as the "dog star" Sirius, a star that held great importance to the ancient Egyptians.

When the heliacal rising occurred (when Sirius became visible above the eastern horizon prior to sunrise), this marked the time when the Nile River, the life blood of the country, started to flood*.  It was the silt that came from this flooding that enabled the farmers to grow their crops, and thus the flooding was associated with bringing fertility to the land.   

Bast - Egyptian Cat Goddess

From around the third millennium BCE Bast (also referred to as Baast, Ubasti and Baset) originated as a protector Goddess of Lower Egypt (the delta of the Nile River), where she was seen as the defender of the ruling pharaoh, and consequently Ra, the Solar deity.  This gained her the titles of "Lady of the Flame" and "Eye of Ra", thus symbolising the fertilising force of the Sun's rays.  By 930 BCE, the power of Bast was acknowledged by all Egyptians.

Bast's role diminished over time however as, after the unification of upper and lower Egypt, Sekhmet, a similar Lioness war deity, became more dominant.  In the first millennium BCE, as domesticated cats were becoming more and more popular as pets, Bast began to be represented as a woman with the head of a cat.  In some images, she was depicted as a cat carrying the Sun.  By the Middle Kingdom, the domesticated cat had appeared as her sacred animal, and later during the New Kingdom, Bast was depicted as a woman with the head of a cat or a lioness, carrying a sacred rattle and a box or basket.