11 



to the sun also. Plutarch says that the image of a female cat 

 was placed at the top of the sistrum as an emblem of the lunar 

 orb. Horapollo asserts that the cat was worshipped in the temple 

 of Heliopolis, sacred to the sun. Some scholars claim to have 

 found evidence that one sex was believed to be emblematic of 

 the moon, and that the other was symbolic of the sun. Such 

 homage was paid the animal possibly because its eyes change the 

 form and size of their pupils with the waxing and waning of the 

 orbs of dav and night, and become more brilliant when the moon 

 is full. 



A cat-headed goddess appears in the temples of Egypt, known 

 as Bast, Pasht, Sekhet, Pasche, Tefnut or Menhi, believed by 

 some to have been the Diana or hunting goddess 

 of the Egyptians. She is referred to by others 

 as the goddess of love or pleasure. The cat well 

 might be chosen to represent both Diana and Venus. 

 This goddess, known to the Greeks as Bubastis, 

 seems to have antedated the deification of the cat, 

 and to have been a lioness goddess until the cat 

 was domesticated, when the deification of the king 

 of beasts apparently was forgotten, and the "little 

 lion" of the fireside took its place as an object 

 of veneration. 



From the twelfth dynasty onward pussy seems 

 to have become a precious jewel — a fetish of the 

 Egyptian people. The valley of the Nile was then 

 a great grain-growing region, and Egypt the gran- 

 ary of the ancient world. No doubt the utility 

 of the cat in catching rats and mice appealed to 

 the Egyptians, but this was merely incidental, and 

 no adequate reason for the exceeding veneration 

 with which cats were treated. 



The extreme reverence, affection and solicitude displayed by 

 the people of Egypt for this animal are illustrated by historic 

 tales of the ancients which seem incredible in the light of the 

 twentieth century. The law forbade the sinful killing of a cat. 

 The city of Bubastis, now in ruins, between the arms of the Nile 

 and above the present town of Benha-el-Asl, was dedicated to 

 cats and cat worship. Bubastis was built in the time of Thothmes 

 IV, about 1500 B.C. Herodotus records the pilgrimage of seven 

 hundred thousand people to this city in one year, and asserts 

 that the lives of cats were held so sacred that when a fire took 

 place, and an impulse to rush into it seemed to possess the felines, 

 the Egyptians occupied themselves with keeping them away from 



Egyptian cat 

 goddess. 



