Bast - Cat Worship
Bast/Bastet is the name the Egyptians gave to the cat goddess. Cat worship was one reason for the continued success of Egyptian civilisation over many millennia. Cats were protectors of the home, of women and of the granaries.
Egyptian culture only fell into serious decline with the rise of the Rome and the final decline of the Temple of Bast came with the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christianisation in Roman dominated Egypt was a brutal affair, the murder of the famous scholar and pagan Hypatia being one example of the use of force against traditional forms of worship. The rise of the cross was not gentle. The murder of Hypatia was one act in the rise of patriarchy as women scholars, intellectuals and priests were violently oppressed by the new Roman Christianity. That is not to say that the position of woman was particularly good in the ancient world before then, but the Temple of Bast had feminine images of the divine which at least allowed for a god to be female. Under the new regime there could only be one god and that god was a man. Any suggestion of a feminine divine was to be suppressed for millennia. But the worship of Bast survived in unfamiliar places. Bast is not a Goddess who takes the form of a cat, she is the Mother of Cats. Her blessing is domestic and of the protection of the hearth. The giving of food and affection were once run by an organised priesthood but the rise of the new monotheism required this to become a low church. One so hidden that the rituals of Bast worship were no longer seen as threatening or even of spiritual significance. Those dedicated to cats were no longer seen as priestesses of a pagan religion but merely eccentric and non-threatening. This was not always an easy path, the rise of the Puritan (Reformed Protestant) movement in Europe and which later migrated en masse to the Americas contained within it a deep hostility to cats. They associated it with “witchcraft” and perhaps some of them even felt the old spiritual connection to Bast. Were medieval “Witches” worshipping Bast? We’d challenge the social construction of “Witches” first of all. Especially by those hostile to them. That served an oppressive agenda which was often driven by the needs of local politics and economics rather than relating to any surviving pagan practices in Christian Europe. However, there is no doubt that the fear of Witches served an important role in maintaining conformity and order in some areas and was therefore useful to local elites. In some places non-conformists or “troublemakers” could easily be lynched under a charge of witchcraft.
We would see some traditional and neo-Witches as Bast worshippers and see Witchcraft as akin to the name given to a slave by its master. Witchcraft was a Christian construction used to control, mainly female, mainly poor, mainly clever, mainly cat owning people. Some of it is the transmutation of cat worship under the intense pressure of state run monotheism. The danger is always of projective identification, that we start performing the role rather than being ourselves.
The murder of cats by Christians during the early modern period lead inevitably to the spread of rats in urban areas. The rise of the rats provided a ready pool of vectors when the Black Death came from the East. Bubonic plague is spread by rat fleas and if you have a lot of rats you have a lot of plague. As anyone with a rodent problem can tell you, the only effective pre-modern way to control a rat population is with a cat.
In the modern era cat worship in the western world is alive and well. It often doesn’t call itself that but the link between cats and human remains.
Wherever people love cats there is the love of Bast.
