Nyx in the House of Night

being worshipped at least 5,000 years ago, because the earliest portrait of Bast was found in a temple built in the Fifth Dynasty, around 3000 b.c. Bast is usually portrayed either as a cat or with a woman’s body and a cat’s head. (There are also statues of her with a lion’s head, which are easily confused with statues of Sekhmet.) Bast usually wore a long dress and carried an aegis or shield, as well as a sistrum, which was a kind of rattle used in the worship of Isis.
A Cat Goddess in Florida?
A sixteenth-century wooden sculpture known as the Key Marco Cat was excavated on Florida’s Marco Island in 1895 by anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. The six-inch-tall carving shows a slender kneeling human body with a cat’s head. The figure is leaning slightly forward, hands on knees, as if listening to a particularly interesting conversation. No one really knows who carved the Key Marco Cat or which culture it belonged to, but the best guess is that it’s connected with the Calusa, a Native American people who lived in Florida between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, and that the wooden figurine survived because it was buried in a bog. (Or perhaps it survived because cats have nine lives.) We also have no idea whether the Calusa regarded cats as gods or spirit protectors, but the figurine seems to be a kind of aesthetic kin to the statues of the Egyptian cat gods. The Key Marco Cat now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.
    Bast was believed to be the daughter of two of the most powerful figures in the Egyptian pantheon: Isis, the goddess of motherhood, fertility, and magic, and her husband, Osirus, the sun god who ruled the Underworld and protected the souls of the dead. By 950 b.c., Bast was a goddess in her own right, with the combined powers of her divine parents. Like Isis, she was a goddess of fertility, sexuality, and magic identified with the moon. Like Osirus, she was a sun god and a protector of the dead. As a sun god, Bast was a symbol of life and light, of the warm rays of the sun that make crops grow. She was also a healer.
    All cats were considered direct links to Bast, and thus sacred. A cat in the house was believed to bring the goddess’ divine favor and protection against misfortune. Household cats were treated with great respect, often allowed to eat from their masters’ plates. It was forbidden, under the penalty of death, to kill a cat even by accident. If a house cat died, the family went into mourning, shaving their eyebrows and beating their breasts at the funeral. Even the poor were expected to give their cats a proper burial. Temple cats, which were considered actual representations of the goddess, received the most elaborate funerals of all. Their bodies were mummified and placed in sarcophagi, usually with a bowl of milk. It was believed that the priests’ prayers kept these bowls filled in the afterlife.
    The lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, whose name means the “Mighty One,” was also a solar god, but she represented fire and the scorching, devouring rays of the sun. Statues of Sekhmet show a female lion or a woman with a lion’s head, often crowned by a solar disk. A fiery glow was said to come from her body, and the hot, desert winds were her breath. Sekhmet came into the world with a dark purpose: to destroy the enemies of Ra. Ra, who was sometimes referred to as the “Great Cat,” was another sun god and king of all the Egyptian gods. It was said he created Sekhmet from the fire in his eye in order to punish humans who had sinned. A warrior goddess known as the “Crusher of Hearts,” Sekhmet spread terror and plagues and was one of the most bloodthirsty deities in any pantheon. When Ra initiated the Slaying of Mankind to punish humans who rebelled against him, Sekhmet killed so eagerly and savagely that even Ra, who had asked for her aid in the slaughter, saw that if she continued, humankind would be wiped out. He had to trick her in order to stop her—he got her drunk.
    But that was hardly the end of Sekhmet’s influence. Her image appeared on temple doorways as a guardian of wisdom. In the millennia that followed she was worshipped as a deity of fate, associated with magic and sorcery. Because of her powers of sorcery, she was prayed to as a great healer, a goddess of childbirth, and a patron of bonesetters. Still, she never lost her taste for blood. Her favorite sacrifices were children.
    Cat worship continued in Egypt until the time of the Romans. It was