Happy Bast Day !

The feast day of Bast is celebrated on October 31. The Egyptians whooped it up with merry making, music, drinking, feasting and dancing.

Cats are magnetic animals with a strong power to fascinate or repel, and most of us faced unexpectedly with one admit that we either love them or we can't stand the sight of them.

Historically, the cat was first endowed with archetypal power in Egypt where it came to be regarded as a Sacred animal. For the cat is identified with Bast

Bast is the goddess of the rising sun, the moon, truth, enlightenment, lesbians, sexuality, pleasure, fertility, bounty, birth, plenty, the home, music, dance, the arts, hemp, and serpent-slayer of the sun. She was the beloved goddess of Ancient Egypt and the protectress of women, children, and domestic cats.

Usually shown as a cat headed woman holding a sistrum percussion instrument, she represents the Maiden aspect of the Triple Goddess. But Bast moves, with the moon, to the fruitful woman with swelling womb.

Bast was the possessor of the Eye of Horus, the sacred utchat. Over time the utchat became more associated with cats and was often cat shaped. Egyptian women used these cat amulets as fertility tokens, praying to have as many children as cats have kittens.

Our modern names for the cat are derived from the word utchat: cat, chat, cattus, gatus, gatous, gato, katt, katte, kitte, kitty, etc. one variation of her name was Pasht, and from this we get the remaining Indo-European words for the cat: pasht, past, pushd, pusst, and puss.

The negative, darker side of Bast is her twin sister, Sekhmet. As the lioness goddess, Sekhmet symbolises the destructive forces in Nature, and together the sister goddesses make up a whole - the balance of light and dark

Sekhmet is the Goddess of sunset, destruction, death, rebirth and wisdom. She is typically shown as a black skinned woman with the head of a lioness and eyes and hair of orange or red. The cycle of life and death was created when the primeval Goddess Sekhmet-Bast divided into the two sisters. Sekhmet represents the Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess.

The feast day of Bast was celebrated on October 31st, with music, song and much enthusiastic dancing. A great week-long festival was held in the holy city of Bubastis attracting devotees from all over the country to celebrate along the riverbanks and through the city streets. Herodotus tells of crowds swelling to 700,000. You could perhaps say that Hallowe'en was originally celebrated as the Feast of Sekhmet and Bast.

Today, ruins mark the joyful city of Bubastis, the once-proud temple is nothing but tumbled blocks and Bast is largely forgotten.

Take a moment to honour this ancient egyptian goddess. Light a green candle, her sacred colour, and be affectionate to a cat, her cherished animal.