Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [48]
Certainly from 1500 B.C. paintings and carvings show the erstwhile ferocious warrior cat Ra and the great mother Bast now very much at home in Egyptian family and social life and living well, jeweled and pampered. That was the year a temple was dedicated to Bastet at Beni-Hassan on the Nile, and from all over Egypt people sent their cats to be buried there, embalmed, spiced, and mummified, with turquoise collars around their necks and cloth ears and painted eyes. In the nineteenth century, excavation of this site yielded three hundred thousand cat mummies, along with some mummified mice as food for the long journey. They were shipped to England and auctioned off as fertilizer, the auctioneer, according to a newspaper report, using a stiffly mummified cat as a gavel. They brought around eighteen dollars a ton. Considering the extensive Egyptian curses invoked by even the accidental molesting of even a single cat, it would be interesting to learn what happened afterward to the fertilizer entrepreneurs and the auctioneer, and their descendants.
Sacred as they were, Egyptian domestic cats were no mere decorations. They were companions. In 1400 B.C., we see a cat retrieving a duck for a hunter, and in another picture a man whose name is given as Mutsa has taken his family and his cat fishing and duck hunting; the cat is eagerly poised to leap in and bring back the duck. There seems to have been a doglike tone to the relationship: the cat gets taken along. In a New Kingdom (1570–1075 B.C.) carving, Queen Tiyi is in a canoe with her daughters, sitting on a chair, and a brisk-looking striped cat sits under the chair and enjoys the outing. Any modern apartment cat would envy it.
The cat came to banquets. In one scene, the woman has tied her cat to the leg of her chair, where it’s trying to unfasten itself to get to a bowl of food just out of reach. In another, a cat with a ring in its ear sits under the woman’s chair while the man holds a kitten on his lap; the kitten plays with his sleeve. At another banquet, the cat under the chair is eating a fish. Under a chair has always been a good place for cats; it keeps them from getting tripped over and offers access to dropped fish.
In the temples the high priests watched the temple cats day and night for the omens and prophecies spelled out by how they slept and woke and stretched, and held their tails and whiskers. The expression in their eyes told whether or not the sick would recover. In the street, a man who found a dead cat had to run away screaming and lamenting, lest someone think he had killed it himself, even by accident; killing a cat was punishable by death from stoning. In the house, if the family cat died the family shaved off their eyebrows and went into deep mourning, and the body was mummified at all possible expense. If the house caught fire, the cat had to be rescued first. At adolescence, children had a cat’s silhouette tattooed on their arms to call down the blessings of Bastet on their lives. At human funerals, the deceased held an ivory wand with a cat’s head to guard him on his trip to the land of the dead; various later traditions in other countries took up the cat as guide and protector of the soul after death.
The Egyptians seem to have had no trouble connecting the powerful supernatural goddess with the cat curled up at the foot of the bed or begging scraps in the kitchen; they were the same, and not the same, a difficult concept for us whose deities have been centralized and invisible for so long. Religion was tangible and flexible, and divinity flickered like an antic lightning from host to host. Priests wove their own colors into the rationale. First causes, if there were any, were not only lost, they were unimportant. Perhaps in the beginning cats had something to do with lions; the dangerous cats have always been nervously respected, and jaguars were worshipped as gods in pre-Columbian Mexico, Guatemala,