Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [47]
“Puss,” on the other hand, comes from Bastet, or Bast, or Pasht, the Egyptian cat-headed goddess. The pleasant thing about feline scholarship is that anyone can play; your guess is as good as theirs, and I’d like to submit “puss” as coming from “Pss!", the sound you make when you’d like a cat to stop ripping the furniture. Because it approximates the hiss of a hostile cat, your cat will probably glance up at you, if not actually desist from ripping, as even the Egyptians may have noticed. I admit it doesn’t sound very scholarly, but I submit it anyway. It’s better than “to catch by seeing.”
Even the scientific classifications are subject to argument. The OED calls puss Felis domesticus and the wildcat Felis catus, but the Britannica admits of no domesticus and uses catus for house cats and house cats only. Some authorities call the wildcat sylvestris; others consider it the same as a house cat and call it whatever they’re calling her. The American bobcat is sometimes set apart as Felis
rufa and sometimes lumped together with Felis lynx. The problem seems to be that classifications are based on skulls and teeth, an area where all cat-creatures are so similar that science has trouble telling one from another, except for the cheetah, which has nonretractable claws and likes to go for walks on a leash and is arguably more dog than cat.
In paintings and statues the Egyptians’ cat, whoever she was, sits tall and narrow and stately with her back very straight, as befits divinity.
In the early days there was nothing cuddly about the Egyptian cat gods. The Book of the Dead is said by some to have been already ancient at the time of the First Dynasty in 5650 B.C., though others move it up to 3500; a papyrus copy of it from 1580 B.C. offers us an early glimpse of the Great Cat Ra, the male cat, the sun-god cat. Sir Ernest Budge’s translation begins, “I am the Cat which fought near the Persea Tree in Heliopolis on the night when the foes of Neb-er-tcher were destroyed.” The illustration shows a ferocious-looking cat slicing into a huge snake with a knife; the snake is Set, the serpent of evil and darkness. Eclipses of the sun in Egypt became reenactments of this primal battle between the snake-forces of darkness and the cat-forces of light; everyone turned out into the streets to cheer for the cat. The cat kept the world safe from darkness. The cat slept curled in a circle like the moon, clearly showing that it was also in charge of tides, weather, and crops. With connections like that the cat was to go far.
At Thebes, on the royal tombs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, an inscription reads, “Praise be to thee, O Ra, exalted Sekhem, thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs, and the governor of the holy Circle, thou art indeed the bodies of the Great Cat.”
The female cat represented a mother-goddess called Mut, later Bastet, Bast, Pasht, Ubastet, or Bubastis; the Egyptians were easygoing about names. Some say Bastet was the offspring of the sun god Osiris (or Ra or Horus or Ptah) and his wife Isis, while others hold that Isis was a later evolution of Bastet. Somehow Hathor, goddess of pleasure, was involved in it too. Maybe the Egyptians could keep all this straight in their heads, or maybe they didn’t bother and just let the priests worry about it.
The earliest portrait of the cat-headed Bastet is in a Fifth Dynasty temple dating from around 3000 B.C. Mut/Bastet was in charge of motherhood, and sex, and fertility, but in another aspect she was connected with Sekhnet, the lion-headed goddess of war, death, and sickness. She also supervised good health, and music and dancing, and crops, and hunting, and wisdom, and happiness.
Some scholars suggest that, though sacred, the cat wasn’t necessarily domesticated much before 1500 B.C.