Bast as a goddess of abundance

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about Bast while I was walking home from one of my college classes. I used to have a friend that gave me a hard time about picking a goddess that was a "party goddess." And I am so not a party person; I am the person in the corner that has been there for five minutes, and that is about an hour too long as far as I am concerned. I am also not very sexually amorous either which also makes Bast look like a bad choice for me; no, I do not go tom-catting around.

Quite simply, I am a prudish stick-in-the-mud. Therefore is his mind, there is no way that Bast should be connected with me. (Obviously, he has no truck with the theory that you should deal with gods who have a different outlook on life than you do, in order to shore up your weaknesses.)

While this former friend and I have parted paths (long story---basically I had no time to spare), I still can't but help think about his "party goddess" label occasionally when I mediate on Bast. I do understand where he was coming from with the comment, as will all those who have read stories about the ancient Egyptian festival of Bast.

But Bast is so much more. She is the lighter side of her dark sister Sekmet. She is probably connected with the Strength card of the Tarot though some energetic or philosophical manner.

Bast was definitely sacred in ancient Egypt, as were her animal of choice, the cat. Now, these are not are typical housecats; these were cats one step removed from the wild. The reason that cats were protected was the fact that they were a much needed form of pest control. Large grain stores tends to attract mice and rats; you need something to keep the scurrying pests down to an acceptable level where they are not eating you out of hut and silo.

Enter the cat. Today, even as I am writing this, I find that it is hard to believe that a cat can be bothered to get up and hunt down anything. But then again, I have three cats on the sofa with me---and they are slowly taking up every spare inch of room.

Yet I do know that they still hunt. Or at least, some of them do. The other day, I found a half-eaten mouse on the front porch. Probably a gift from one of the feral cats that I fed. I hope that they did not expect me to finish eating it for them. I appreciate the present, but even my eating habits are better than that.

Which brings me to why Bast is a goddess of abundance. We all have a bunch of scurry time and money wasters in our lives that if we could get under control, we could actually make some progress towards putting some money into the bank and keeping it there. Securing and protecting the stockpile of wealth, one's resources, and stemming the tide of being nippled to death has the same effect as creating more wealth. Therefore Bast is a goddess of abundance despite the fact that she probably spends as much time sleeping as her four legged counterparts do.