Who Is Bastet? The Cat Goddess of Ancient Egypt

Protector of the home, daughter of the sun, and the deity whose festival Herodotus called the greatest in Egypt. Bastet is where the whole story starts.

Who she was

Bastet — also written Bast, Ubaste or Pasht — is the ancient Egyptian goddess most often shown as a cat, or as a woman with a cat's head. She was worshipped for well over two thousand years, and her cult centre was the Nile Delta city of Bubastis (Egyptian Per-Bast, 'House of Bast').

Her domain is broader than 'cats'. She was a protector of the household, of women, of childbirth and of children; a guardian against disease and against evil spirits; and a goddess of music, perfume and joy. In her role as an Eye of Ra she was also a defender of the sun god — which is the thread the game pulls on.

She was a lioness first

This is the part most summaries skip, and it changes how you read everything else. In the earliest periods Bast was leonine, not feline-domestic — a fierce lioness deity closely comparable to Sekhmet. The shift toward the domestic cat form happened gradually, becoming dominant around the first millennium BCE.

So the gentle hearth-cat image is the late Bastet. Underneath her is something considerably more dangerous, and Egyptians kept both readings at once: the cat that sits on your lap is the same animal that kills the snake in your grain store.

Eye of Ra, and the serpent

Bastet was one of several goddesses who could act as the Eye of Ra — the sun god's protective and punishing aspect, sent out to defend him. This matters because of what the sun god had to be defended from.

Every night, in Egyptian cosmology, Ra's solar barque travelled through the underworld and was attacked by Apep (Greek: Apophis), the serpent of chaos. Apep had to be defeated before dawn — and defeated again the following night, forever.

In Spell 17 of the Book of the Dead, the being that kills Apep is described as a great cat, shown beneath the sacred ished (persea) tree at Heliopolis with a knife. Ancient commentary within the spell itself identifies that cat with Ra. It is one of the oldest surviving images of a cat as a slayer of monsters, and it is the direct ancestor of every cat-hero story since.

What worship actually looked like

Bastet's worship was material and enormous. Archaeologists have recovered vast numbers of bronze cat votives, cat-shaped amulets and inscribed offerings, most from the Late Period. Pilgrims bought them and dedicated them at her temples in exchange for favour.

There were also cat cemeteries — at Bubastis, at Saqqara, at Beni Hasan and elsewhere — holding mummified cats in very large numbers. This was an industry, with breeding, mummification and sale of votive animals operating at scale. Modern examination of some mummies has found young animals and, in some cases, bundles containing little or no cat at all, which suggests the trade was not uniformly honest.

It is worth being blunt about the tension here: reverence for cats and mass production of cat mummies existed side by side. Ancient religion does not always resolve neatly.

Bastet and Sekhmet

Bastet and Sekhmet are often described as two faces of one idea — the protective and the destructive aspects of the same solar power. Broadly, Sekhmet is associated with Upper Egypt and Memphis, Bastet with Lower Egypt and Bubastis.

Treat the neat 'two halves of one goddess' formulation with mild caution: it is a useful summary and it reflects genuine ancient association, but Egyptian theology was regional, long-lived and not systematised. Deities merged, split and swapped attributes across three thousand years.

Her festival

The annual festival at Bubastis is described by the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories, Book 2), who reports barges full of celebrants travelling the Nile with flutes and clapping, shouting to the crowds on the banks, and an attendance of around 700,000 with more wine drunk than in all the rest of the year.

Herodotus is our main source, he was writing as a foreign visitor, and his numbers elsewhere are frequently inflated — so read the figure as 'enormous', not as a census. More on the festival →

How to say it

Bastet is usually rendered BAS-tet. The older form Bast rhymes with 'past'. Egyptian was written without most vowels, so every modern pronunciation is a reconstruction, and 'Bastet' itself reflects a later spelling convention.

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