The sleek black cat in every museum gift shop hides a much fiercer origin. Around 2890 BCE, during Egypt's Second Dynasty, Bast was a roaring lioness, daughter of Ra and Isis, whose defining job was to defeat the chaos serpent Apep each night as the Eye of Ra. This episode traces how, over two thousand years of agricultural change, that biological weapon softened into Bastet, goddess of pregnancy, childbirth, and the home.

We explore how African wildcats drawn to grain stores became guardians against rats and cobras, why her name came to mean she of the ointment jar, and how the wrathful side of her identity was handed off to Sekhmet. Drawing on Herodotus, we tour the sunken, water-cooled temple at Bubastis, the annual feast of drunkenness said to draw 700,000 pilgrims, the 300,000 mummified cats found at the site, and the Greek decision to ...