Writing a New Invocation to Bast

Greetings to the readers of The Pagan Mom Blog and to my regular readers. Today, I would like to share a few thoughts I had while writing the invocation to Bast that was used for the 31 Days of Deity.

(The guest post I did, an invocation to Bast, should be live now---but considering that I am pre-scheduling this post to go live while I am still sleeping, I could be wrong.)

I chose to write about Bast for two reasons. One, she is the patron deity of the local Golden Dawn lodge I belong to. Two, she keeps bringing me cats. (Ok, maybe she is not bringing me cats, but you must admit that I have quite a few of them.)

The reason I chose to do an invocation is simple: I rather enjoy performing them.

It is not the first time that I have written ritual scripts to use with Bast. One of my pride and joys is the "Wiccan" quarter calls I wrote a couple of years ago. It probably won't be the last time either.

Now in case you are a newbie to the term, an invocation manifests the spiritual and magical energies invoked inside one's own consciousness; its counterpart, an evocation manifests the energies outside oneself. (Ok, that is not completely true; but I am trying to keep this simple.) In Wiccan terms, an invocation is like a "drawing down," and an evocation is like "calling the quarters."

During the course of doing research for creating this invocation, I must admit that I was rather appalled by the general lack of information. While I consulted many different sources, often the result was the same information (a paragraph or two) that I had seen in all the rest of the sources. At a certain point, I discovered myself shaking my head over the fact that Herodotus is still a major source.

This lack of information is not especially surprising. After all, Bast (or Bastet) was a goddess that was worshipped more by the common people of Ancient Egypt than she was by the ruling class. Because of that, Bast was not mentioned often in the literature that forms the core of our knowledge about Ancient Egyptian mythology.

Even less information was attained when consulting the published documents of Golden Dawn and Egyptian Wicca (the first is not surprising, the second more so). There was some unpublished stuff that influenced what I created. If you can see where the unpublished stuff lays, then you have been taught it (or figured it out on your own). I will openly admit that the IHVH formula for invocations, and the seven layers of godforms played a part in what I created.

While Angela wanted us to provide a list of resources for further research, honestly in this case, I feel it would have been useless list. After all, it was a paragraph here, a line there, and information generally being repeated.

No, the resource for further research and work has already been provided: It is the ritual of invocation itself. Think of it as an instructual tool. The various myths, names and titles of Bast have been condensed into the invocation. Even if one does not want to perform the invocation, one can take it apart line by line to get an idea of how complicated the mythology surrounding Bast was.

And on that note, I must issue an apology. You see, I learn a lot from doing invocations and experiencing various magical forces firsthand. It is how I learn. I realize that it is not everyone's cup of tea; but let's be honest, I was writing the invocation for people like myself.

[As always all complaints about my insensitivity will be read, but not necessarily approved.]