Grief is always a painfully slow experience for me to work my way through—grief for my non-human family members as much as for the human ones. Now, 2 months after her death, I’ve finished the third of three digital mosaics of my cat, Mari. Each image has been increasingly complex, each exploring deeper, less articulate levels of my grief. With the completion of the last picture, my farewell feels complete. My grief is taking up residence in memory and only occasionally flashing into the now.
“Mari: Doorway Into Forever,” image CL Francisco (2022)
I finished this first mosaic on the night of Mari’s death (“Mari: Doorway into Forever,” above). It was built on an earlier image I’d created more than 10 years ago (see below). In it I find myself grappling with the simple fact of her dying and moving beyond my reach.
“Doorway Into Forever,” image by CL Francisco (2012)
The second mosaic, “The Passing of Mari,” (below) I finished two weeks after her death. It reflects on Mari’s own awareness of her living and dying, and the natural place of both in the universe as we experience it.
“The Passing of Mari,” image CL Francisco
The third image, “Slipping Away,” (below) I finished yesterday. It reaches out toward yet further horizons, beginning with Mari’s intentional withdrawal from life and her brief return to my lap on the day of her death (using photos I took of her then). Beyond those beginnings, I tried to capture my sense that the flame I knew as Mari had already begun drifting away on another wind, into vast starscapes yet unknown to me.
Mari was one of two kittens I adopted after I lost the cat who later became Yeshua’s Cat. Since the-cat-who-became-Yeshua’s-Cat was actually named Morgan, I needed a more appropriate name for a cat from the 1st C Levant. Mari (named after the ancient city) kindly loaned me her name, as well as her insights as I wrote. She is survived by her littermate, Bacchus.
Almost 2 years have passed since I last posted any personal updates—2 years of confusion, anger—and grace. Most amazingly, I do NOT have Lewy body dementia (or any other kind of dementia, for that matter): that’s the warm, beating heart of my news. I am infinitely grateful that I won’t be walking that road.
I do have a few thoughts about my experiences in the hands of physicians.
Here’s the background, in case you’re just tuning in. Early in 2019, I saw a respected neurologist, and assumed—foolishly—that he would be a man of principles, skilled in the performance of his art. Feeling anxious and off-balance from the sudden changes in my life, I reached out to him in trust. He, however, did little but look to his own divine omniscience (or personal lottery hopper, whatever) for inspiration before burdening me, a patient he’d barely met, with a capricious diagnosis of a rare and deadly disease. Following up on another doctor’s preliminary sleep study, he took perhaps 15 minutes to administer a quick mental status exam and a standard connect-the-dots psych test and then delivered his extempore diagnosis full-blown, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.
Image CL Francisco
I’m still angry, although I’m trying to let it go. After all, a physician who believes himself a god could easily have contracted his delusion by just breathing the air of our culture. As long as we hail our physicians as god-like purveyors of medical miracles, doctors who lack confidence or crave power will cloak themselves in our expectations like the great Oz in his curtains.
But I must accept some responsibility for my willingness to be misled. No one forced me to accept this man‘s diagnosis as a truth engraved on the foundation of the world. I’ve known for most of my adult life that a diagnosis is simply an opinion—as reliable, or as dubious, as the person who offers it. That’s why we call a second diagnosis from a different doctor a “second opinion.” Still, in defense of my foolishness, I was anxious and off balance, and not thinking very objectively.
Image CL Francisco
And this is one of the huge ethical challenges of doctor-patient relationships: physicians encounter people at some of the most critical points in their lives, when they’re at their most vulnerable. We might even define patients as people experiencing diminished capacity brought on by poor health and the resultant anxiety. They come praying that a doctor will work miracles with his/her incomparable wisdom and skill. Patients are predisposed to be gullible: easy prey, in fact . . . except that doctors aren’t supposed to be predators (and most aren’t). Going to a doctor should never be a case of caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware.”
Image CL Francisco
So I’m back where I started. Angry. If I were a litigious person, I’d have sued him; however, I’m not, and I didn’t. I can only say what many others have said before me: in a more humane world, doctors would be required to experience—at least in some virtual sense—the conditions they would treat before being loosed on a world of suffering patients. That might go a long way toward eliminating a physician’s god complex.
Grace . . .
Grace intervened in late 2020, in the person of a wise and caring neurologist I happened upon during a phone conference she had with my husband. He mentioned my diagnosis in passing, and she asked to speak with me. By the time we hung up, I had an appointment to see her the next week. Two weeks after that, following a huge battery of blood and tissue tests, she confirmed her initial diagnosis of small fiber neuropathy (SFN) and started my treatment.
SFN is a complex syndrome with a staggering array of possible symptoms. I find the diagram below helpful in making sense of it:
There is no cure for small fiber neuropathy, but it is treatable, especially if caught early. Its progression can be slowed, and some losses may be recouped, although not completely. In my case, I’d already had two years of acute symptoms without any treatment before receiving an accurate diagnosis. Fortunately, I’ve responded well (if slowly) to therapy, particularly in areas of cognitive loss. I may never write another book, but I’ve recovered much of my vocabulary, my brain fog has lessened, and I’m remembering more of what I read. I can write letters and short essays (with the constant support of a thesaurus), and on a good day I can even edit existing manuscripts.
So, to all of you who have sent me messages of love and encouragement, I thank you! I may not have replied, but I’ve been warmed by your concern. I still don’t anticipate having much presence online, since I find writing of any kind exhausting. This post, for example, took three full days to compose, not counting getting it up online. I try to choose where my energy will be best spent. But I no longer perceive my life as a tragedy in process; I’m just aging, as every living creature does.
Image CL Francisco
I sometimes imagine these last few years as an expression of my physical uniqueness. Just as each of us has different fingerprints, and a distinct mosaic of genetic patterning, so every body slows down and wears out in ways that reflect a person’s particular life experiences and physical being. Our paths home will always take us by surprise, because no two are ever the same.
A note in closing: my 15-year-old grey tabby cat Mari, whose name I borrowed for the Yeshua’s Cats books, is dying of advanced renal disease. (The cat who inspired Yeshua’s Cat was actually named Morgan—an unlikely name for an ancient Levantine cat! So I used the name I’d given to one of the two kittens I’d adopted after Morgan’s death.)
Image: SDean@sdean.netImage CL Francisco
Mari and I are exploring the shadowy vales of aging and illness together. We’ve become unexpectedly close as her health has deteriorated. Sometimes I’m not sure which one of us is the woman and which the cat. My husband says that Mari has been my sea anchor for most of her fifteen years, and that she’ll take pieces of me with her when she goes. I’m sure she will, but she’ll also leave pieces of herself behind. Neither of us will be the same.
Image CL Francisco
Afterthoughts
What follows is an unpublished post from June, 2020, written 1 ½ years after I was erroneously diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, and 3 months before I began treatment for small fiber neuropathy. It was intended to be the 4th in a series of posts on Lewy body dementia, but it was shuffled aside in the excitement of a possibly new diagnosis . . .
Robin Hobb’s Memory Stone and Progressive Dementia
“I feel like a tree being ruthlessly pruned into a stump,” June 30, 2020
I wrote these words earlier today, as I was updating a symptom diary that I’ve been keeping for over a year now, so that I can remember how I’ve changed, and when. It took me a long time to understand and articulate that feeling, partly because I am diminished, and my awareness is narrowing. I feel life less keenly every day. I forget to care—about people and things I love. I drift, and draw in. My horizons shrink. My spirit vision darkens.
Image by CL Francisco
In an earlier post I mentioned that I forget every new book I read within a few months (books I read many years ago I still remember clearly). So when I find good books, I can enjoy them over and over again! This past Christmas my son gave me three new books: the Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb’s epic fantasy. I didn’t really like the first book when I started it, but since it was my son’s gift, and chosen with care, I didn’t set it aside. I’m not sure when I got hooked: maybe it was when the wolf Nighteyes entered the story. I know I was captivated by then. I bought the trilogies that continued the tale as I approached the end of each of the others. Nine thick books. And tonight I finished all nine for the third time.
Robin Hobb’s Trilogies with Fitz and the Fool
Hobb’s books haven’t been just entertainment. For me, the Farseer series (including The Tawny Man and Fitz and the Fool trilogies) is that rare thing, a story that flickers with hidden meaning, troubling and fascinating me with something just out of reach. I believe that the only way to understand a story like that it is to journey to its heart—and to mine. I’ve always done this by reading a book again and again, until a key eventually emerged to unlock the mystery. I’m not sure if forgetting the details between readings has helped or hindered me with these books, but when I closed the ninth book tonight, I finally understood.
Image CL Francisco
Hobb creates a fantasy world where some humans are gifted with an extraordinary sense she calls Skill. At the end of their lives, a very few choose to journey to a distant quarry and carve a dragon or other beast from the near-sentient stone there called Memory Stone. As they carve the stone, they release all their memories, and eventually their physical bodies, into the carved stone, hoping to bring it to a kind of life and achieve for themselves a limited immortality: their memories never really die.
Image CL Francisco
Image CL Francisco
The most difficult part of the dragon-carving is the carvers’ long and arduous process of yielding up the memories that make them who they are, in hopes that they have accumulated enough depth of memory to bring the stone to life. But once these carvers have given up a memory, they no longer have access to it. As their lives are poured out, they become vague and distant. They lose the love they feel for friends and family, recalling only dimly the fact of its earlier existence. They drift away from life, and from all but the current of Skill that draws them on.
I’m sure you see the parallels by now—not exact, but intriguing. I don’t know if Hobb intended to mythologize progressive dementia (or cognitive loss), but I believe she has, at least for me. What makes her telling so unexpectedly personal is her description of the effort her carvers make to invest their ever-dwindling strength and capacity into the creation of something that encompasses who they are . . . that embodies their lives’ essence.
image CL Francisco
Her images shine a light on my own days, making sense of what I have been doing in darkness and unknowing. For I also feel a compelling need to complete expressions of myself: a couple of unfinished books, paintings for my grandson’s walls, pen and ink portraits of my family, a Flickr photo site. I don’t do them as memorials, or to have my name remembered. I’ve always preferred to remain invisible, anonymous, like a cat hidden beneath the shadowy eaves of a forest. Instead, I am pouring my life into a spiritual nexus that I sense as myself, and the effort I expend contributes to its solidity.
Image CL Francisco
It’s so hard to put this into words!
British folk in times past sometimes spoke of retiring from the world in their old age to “make their souls.” That phrase feels oddly appropriate here. I am struggling to yield who I am into the will of the One, whose Being flows like a river through all that is. I am clarifying for myself who and what I am while confronting my own dissolution. I may grow vague and distant, unresponsive and hollowed out, as the life I’ve known seeps away. But by willingly releasing what I know as myself into the Creator’s vessel, I rest on the Deep of Being. I make my soul.
Lately I’ve been clearing out the clutter on my computer’s hard drive (my Mac is getting on in years and complaining about all the extra weight it’s carrying), and I came across this short essay I wrote in 2015. As far as I can tell, I never posted it anywhere. So for those of you who follow Yeshua’s Cats, here is another reflection on Mari’s beginnings . . .
Morgan, the cat from the wild woods
I remember the year I started writing The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat. I was working for a tiny non-profit whose prospects had just been obliterated by a catastrophic wildfire. The young cat who inspired the character of Yeshua’s cat had died as a consequence of the fire. My mother died a month after that. For months I spent my days climbing the burnt-out canyon slopes, measuring the severity of the burn in soil and trees, photographing the devastation, and assessing pockets of recovery.
After the Wildfire
In our battle against the land-owner’s determination to bring in salvage loggers (a battle we won), I dug tiny holes into the bark of every tree on our 2000 acres that still showed signs of life. The trees with healthy cambium layers I marked with green circles, exempting them from the loggers’ harvest–and, in the end, aggravating the loggers enough to cause them to back off, complaining that the profits weren’t worth their time without the living trees.
Trees with a chance of life
Even with our few hard-won victories, the stress took its toll on everyone. And no matter how hard we worked to support the land’s recovery, a non-profit foundation that relied on land-based workshops couldn’t survive on acreage that insurance companies saw as a treacherous ruin. We were forced to leave within the year.
Moving
On Easter Sunday of that last year, almost nine months after the fire, I went out walking in the blackened forest—only a few days after the kind of heavy rain that can be almost as devastating to a burned landscape as the original fire. I first visited a favorite Ponderosa pine that the fire had seared into a gleaming skeleton. Strange how the beauty of a tree endures after death; it merely changes.
But what I remember most clearly from that Easter walk was an unexpected discovery in an eroded gully cutting down the canyon slope. Its chalky soil abraded away by torrents of ash and water, a now-vertical arroyo wall had been transformed into art. Like a sudden ripple of joy in a sullen stream of melancholy music, the graceful skeleton of a tiny prehistoric horse leapt out of the bank to canter at my side. I almost didn’t see her. Dead for thousands of years, and yet somehow alive again.
Prehistoric horse
In a time when death seemed heaped upon death, the small skeleton might have been just one more death—but instead it felt like a gift, bringing with it wonder and hope. As Mari likes to say, it was a paradox.
A Burning Hope, CL Francisco
Sometime in the next few days I wrote the words, “My name is Mari, a name given to me by the man they call Yeshua ben Yosef.”
Morgan, by CL Francisco
If you count my PhD dissertation—and I do—then Yeshua’s Cat was my fourth book. I just never bothered to publish the others. Maybe I will some day, or maybe I’ll just publish with a pseudonym. Common wisdom decrees that an author shouldn’t change genres.
Postscript:
I did try using a pseudonym, but eventually I took my own name back. The Yeshua’s Cats ‘series of five books is now complete. My dissertation is available online at https://www.academia.edu/37357137/. The first of my three mysteries (This Madness of the Heart) was published a couple of years ago, and the second (Blood on Holy Ground) has just been released on Kindle. The third and last (Red Cliffs of Fall) is in the reviewers’ hands and will be will be out as soon as I can manage it. So keep an eye out!
I’ve been thinking a lot about how This Madness of the Heart (and all the following Miranda Lamden Mysteries) fit together with my Yeshua’s Cats series–and why I feel certain the two series can coexist as books by the same author. But since my reasons are more feelings and instincts than logic, I’ve had trouble putting them into words.
So I did what I often do when I need to make sense of something: I created a piece of art (below). After all, what good is an art therapy degree if you can’t use it to clarify your own confusion? If I’m lucky, by explaining the image I’ll be opening up what lies behind it!
The Sleuth, Chi Rho, and the Cat
So, what are you looking at here?
First, I chose a Hubble image for the background: “Interacting Spiral Galaxies” . . . surely ideal for this project, since galaxies don’t often interact–anymore than churchfolk and professor-sleuths! It felt like a propitious beginning.
Hubble, Interacting Spiral Galaxies
Three interlocking circles fill the foreground. The center circle pulses with a glowing gold and green light; the Christian Chi Rho emerges from its heart.
What is the Chi Rho? Like most symbols, it has different meanings across cultures, but for me it’s a symbol used by early Christians in the first three centuries after Yeshua’s birth–before Constantine transformed it into an imperial banner (the cross didn’t emerge as a Christian symbol until after the year 500).
Chi Rho, early 3rd C catacomb
The Chi Rho gets its name from the two Greek letters that overlap to create the symbol: Chi and Rho, the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, or Christ. In the image above, the Greek letters Alpha and Omega are added. I did experiment with using a cross in the center circle, but I like the visual effect of the Chi Rho better, probably because it has “rays” like the sunburst. Anyway, the central circle is meant to be the Christian faith–not the organized religion–but the living faith of all the individuals who hold themselves to be Christian.
The circle to the right is Mari, from Yeshua’s Cat, turning aside from a path in a green forest to investigate the central circle. In her circle she represents all of the natural universe. Creation. Everything that exists naturally, apart from the intervention of humankind. This natural order also includes human beings, since they’re part of the created universe–but not their civilizations.
The totality of the created world–as we know it on Earth–is flowing back from Mari’s search like the tail of a comet.
The circle on the left is where Miranda, my detective, lives. Her circle is the world of human civilization–urban, complex, multi-cultural, and often unsure exactly what they believe. Many, like Miranda, have their roots in Christianity, but have turned away from the church. Spinning out from her circle is a spiral of different world religions. But in her circle she, like Mari, has paused to examine something about the Christian faith that has caught her eye.
Both Mari and Miranda live outside the Christian fold, and they approach it from opposite directions. Mari moves from the non-human, natural environment, Miranda from a detached, urban, academic world. Still, both find themselves intrigued by the light in the center circle. Mari has the easier approach: Yeshua introduces himself by saving her life, and she joins him as a friend. But Miranda has been scarred by her Christian experience; she mistrusts the church and its agendas. As a professor, she sees all religions as examples of the human yearning toward the divine. Truth claims don’t enter the picture. She simply records what she observes, without making judgments. Her methods are catlike: she steps cautiously toward anything new, not committing herself, poised to slip back into the shadows if conflict threatens.
I knew a number of women like Miranda in my years apart from the church. Their worlds were full and rich, but they didn’t screen their experiences through a Christian worldview. Yet they were sometimes attracted by a light shining out from this tradition many of them had left behind.
. . . maybe the light shone through a person
a man like Elmus
or as comfort in the midst of evil
perhaps through the One’s presence in some crisis of their own
or simply in prayer and meditation.
But today we live in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to say, “I believe.” The language is lost. What does it mean to believe? Who are we believing in? People who live in the secular world can’t respond to most Christian overtures–because they don’t understand the words anymore. God-talk is becoming literal non-sense to those outside the churches.
People like Miranda are who they are, just as cats are cats. Each responds to life according to their gifts . . . but for some reason those inside and outside the churches are drawing further apart.
Perhaps we might learn from the effort, and love, we put into cross-species communication with our cats (and dogs, gerbils, birds, and ferrets) . . . and look at the incomprehensible human beings around us as if they concealed inner selves as delightful, unique, and full of surprises as a cat’s. It’s not really such a stretch.
I happen to find the lives of alienated Christians intriguing, perhaps because I’ve been there myself. And if the polls are right, their numbers are growing. Their honesty is often fierce, like their determination never to be taken in again by faux-Christianity and self-serving lies. Sadly we don’t have to look far to find the lurking predators they’re avoiding. And that’s what This Madness of the Heart is about.
Miranda peers into the light of Christian faith–but she looks from a place apart. Her own experiences haven’t shown Christianity to be that promised “light to the gentiles.” So she watches, examines, records, and considers. In the meantime, I feel privileged to narrate her journey.
Readers are always asking me how I get the ideas for my books, and I’m usually at a loss for answers. So with Cat Born to the Purple, I tried to notice right along how the ideas developed. Now I offer you a small window into the earliest beginnings of Purple.
When I introduced Purple’s main character, Eliana, in The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat, I hadn’t planned on writing anything else about her, much less a continuing series of Yeshua’s Cats books! But I did write more books, and Eliana turned out to be one of those characters who set up shop in the back of my mind, insistently hammering at my dreams and thoughts until I allowed her to tell her story: Cat Born to the Purple is her tale.
But before I could tell her story, I had to figure out what her family history might have been, and what circumstances could possibly have left her, a young woman barely more than a child, stoned and near death in the hills of Galilee near Sepphoris. I knew that she was going to be an exceptionally fine weaver and embroiderer, which meant that she probably came from a family that worked with textiles, most likely from one of the semi-professional family workshops found in sizeable towns like Sepphoris.
But her wrongful stoning suggested that she’d had no real family to protect her. How could that have happened? Jewish women of merchant status always had male relatives from their birth-families hovering in the background somewhere, prepared to protect them from abuse. I started reading everything I could find about the area around Sepphoris during the time of Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas, since Eliana would have been born around 12 CE.
Herod the Great’s port at Caesarea Maritima, 10 BCEReconstruction of Sepphoris Dionysos mansion
Scholars have been wrangling for years over whether the Sepphoris of Yeshua’s youth and adult years was primarily Jewish, Greco-Roman, or a mixture of the two. The dust is finally beginning to settle in that argument, leaving what seems to be a clear picture of Sepphoris—along with most of the rest of the Galilee—as predominantly Jewish in population and culture during the early-to-middle 1st C CE. The recently discovered Greco-Roman palaces of Sepphoris came considerably later.
Remains of early 1st C Sepphoris
Almost nothing remains of the mid-1st C city, which would have been almost entirely Jewish. During Yeshua’s lifetime Sepphoris was a regional market and civic center—Herod Antipas’ Galilean capital until he built a new capital at Tiberius around 20 CE. Sepphoris was a large Jewish town for its time and place, but neither Roman in culture, nor heavily gentile.
The most dramatic event in Sepphoris’ history during that early period came soon after Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE, when a band of Jewish dissidents and townspeople overwhelmed the city guard and raided the treasury. Rome’s reprisal was swift and cruel. The rebels were crucified along the highways, and most of Sepphoris’ citizens were sold into slavery at Acco. Herod Antipas rebuilt and fortified the city to some extent before moving on to Tiberius, but he didn’t create the wealthy Greco-Roman Sepphoris whose ruins have been excavated in recent years.
Artist’s Reconstruction of Tiberius
So with this regional history in mind, Eliana’s own family history began to fall into place for me. The timing of Eliana’s birth could easily have placed her grandparents in Sepphoris as weavers and merchants when the city’s residents were sold into slavery by the Romans in 4 BCE. Only their young daughter Sarah—Eliana’s mother—perhaps eight years old at the time, managed to escape. Terrified and confused, the homeless child was taken in by a kindly woman from Shikhin, a neighboring village of about 500 people. Archaeologists recently discovered the ruins of Shikhin only a mile northwest of Sepphoris, just off the main highway connecting Acco and Sepphoris. The Via Maris, the major Roman road that followed Israel’s coastal plain along the Mediterranean Sea, intersected the Acco-Sepphoris road nearby, placing both Sepphoris and Shikhin at a major crossroads.
The low hills of ShikhinShikhin pottery fragments
Archaeologists had long searched for the location of Shikhin, known by reputation as a village that manufactured everyday pottery found in archaeological sites all across Israel. Rabbis of the early Roman period even used Shikhin storage jars as their standard for liquid measure. Shikhin’s period of greatest productivity probably began sometime in the late 1st C BCE and increased through the early Roman period. They were known for strong, fire resistant pottery made from black clay: particularly amphorae (storage jars) and small clay lamps, but also jugs, kraters, cooking pots, and bowls. Archaeologists guess that Shikhin’s potters may have made common cause with wine and oil merchants and sold their pots already filled.
Recent excavations at Shikhin have uncovered cisterns, pits, potters’ wheels, kilns, and large numbers of discarded pieces of pottery damaged in firing, indicating a significant manufacturing area. The site was abandoned around the time of the great earthquake of 363 CE.
Now the story was beginning to take shape in my mind. As a refugee child in a time of chaos, Sarah’s unofficial adoption by a family working at a craft totally unlike her family’s own guaranteed her separation from any extended family who might have survived the upheavals at Sepphoris. She was simply a child working beside her adopted family making pots. Sarah eventually married the potters’ only son and taught her daughter Eliana the skills of a potter. But even though Sarah had lost her parents at a young age, I imagined that she would never have forgotten the weaving and embroidery skills she must have learned at her mother’s knee–which would probably have been valued by her adopted family. These skills she passed on to Eliana as well, along with an innate gift for working with textiles.
Sleeveband from 3rd C CE Mediterranean textileOld brick kilns in Spain
But for Eliana to be without family when Yeshua found her, both her parents must have been dead already. After learning what I could about the manufacture of ancient Palestinian pottery, I decided that her parents might have died together in a fire caused by a collapsing kiln during a minor earthquake (more on that in another post). So Eliana was indeed left alone in the world, a young bride without anyone but treacherous and greedy in-laws to care for her. The complex system of Jewish kin relationships protecting vulnerable women had failed her. Yeshua’s assumption of just such a situation led him to place Eliana with his friend Eli in Cana—which is where Cat Born to the Purple truly begins.
In the end, the unique possibilities presented by 1st C Israel’s culture came together to create the backstory of Eliana’s life, thus laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. Research can be a wonderful thing!
Last year after publishing The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat, I wrote an additional piece of the story that I sent out in my Christmas newsletter. Here it is again, for the first time in a public posting.
For those of you who have the paperback edition of TGATYC, this new piece would be inserted at the top of page 124, just after “. . . filled with laughter.” For those of you with the Kindle edition, it’s in Chapter 15, Magdala, just after Mari muses about the nature of the festival of lights, and before Yeshua starts speaking on the last night of the feast.
“Night Sky Christmas,” C. L. Francisco
One night after everyone had gone to bed I finally asked him. “Are your people celebrating the return of the sun’s warmth when they celebrate their festival of lights, son of Earth?”
“Yes and no, little mother,” he replied, turning his head and smiling as he opened his eyes. “We measure the years by the seasons of the moon, not by the sun’s path, so none of our holy days takes note of the sun’s movement, not even this one. No, this week we rejoice in events almost 200 years past, when a great man named Judas Maccabeus cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem from the pollution of a pagan altar put there by foreign conquerors. Our many lamps call us to remember that the One’s light can dispel even the deepest darkness.”
He rose to his feet and reached out his arm in invitation, so I leapt to his shoulder, wrapping my tail around his neck. Together we walked out under the winter sky and stood on the hill, watching the stars touch the great sea with their cold fire.
“Yet, little leopard,” he continued as if he had never paused, “you are right when you wonder if we are also welcoming the sun’s return. Just as stars grow brighter in the long nights, each light that burns in winter’s darkness whispers of that hope. Together with all Earth’s children, our hearts grow full when we see the sun begin its long journey back to the heights of heaven. This too reminds us of the One’s faithfulness.”
I curled around his neck more closely to dispel the night’s chill, but I said nothing. I only purred with pleasure at his closeness. I sensed that words still lay unspoken in his heart.
“Sweet Mari, my mother told me that I was born on a night like this, when the stars danced in a black sky, and the breath of humans and beasts alike clouded vision with their brief mist. Joy filled the night and sang in the heavens at the wonder of my coming into the world. All things were made new under that sky, she said.”
I rubbed my whiskers against his cheek, and he continued.
“I can almost hear the heavens singing on such nights. The One’s face shimmers behind the host of stars like a distant oasis in the heat of a desert’s summer day. And yet the chill of a winter night and the searing heat of the desert’s noon both lie quiet in the hollow of his hand.
In a A Cat Out of Egypt, Miw, the Egyptian temple cat who narrates the story, is in danger of becoming a cat mummy–and not as a result of a natural death. Several readers have asked whether such a thing could have been based in reality. This week’s blog is my answer.
How were cat mummies created in ancient Egypt? What significance did they have? What kind of process led to the creation of the vast cat cemeteries that archaeologists have discovered among Egyptian ruins? As with most historical questions, the answers are complex.
Cat mummy mask 20 BC,
McClung Museum
Cat Mummies as Votive Offerings
Cat mummies discovered in early excavations at Bubastis were probably the first to be seen by Western explorers/archaeologists, but the cat cemetery unearthed at Beni Hasan (a site roughly 100 miles south of Cairo and known for its beautiful tombs), was carefully described by a Western observer. In 1888, near the rock-cut temple dedicated to the lion goddess Pakhet, a huge cat cemetery was discovered. A lengthy description of the discovery follows, as recorded by British professor W. M Conway:
A common cat mummy
An Egyptian fellah from a neighboring village . . . dug a hole, somewhere in the level floor of the desert, and struck–cats! Not one or two, here and there, but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a stratum thicker than most coal seams, ten to twenty cats deep, mummy squeezed against mummy tight as herrings in a barrel . . . A systematic exploration of the seam was undertaken. The surface sand was stripped off and the cats laid bare. All sorts and conditions of them appeared–the commoner sort caked together in black lumps, out of which here a grinning face, there a furry paw, there a backbone or row of ribs of some ancient puss, stood prominently forth. The better cats and kittens appeared in astonishing numbers, with all their wrappings as fresh as if they had been put into the ground a week, and not 30 centuries, before. Now and again an elaborately plaited mummy turned up; still more rarely one with a gilded face . . . only three cat statues have as yet been found. Two are small bronze figures. The third is a life-size bronze, a hollow casting, inside which the actual cat was buried . . . The plundering of the site was a sight to see, but one had to stand well to windward. All of the village children came and provided themselves with the most attractive mummies they could find. These they took down to the river to sell for the smallest coin . . . The path became strewn with mummy cloth and bits of cats’ skulls and bones and fur in horrid profusion, and the wind blew the fragments about and carried the stink afar . . . .
But most of the Egyptian cat mummies discovered in this and other such cemeteries in the late 19th century–nineteen tons of them–were bought in bulk and shipped to Europe to be sold at auction as fertilizer.
Who were these cats, and where did they come from? How did such huge numbers come to be packed into common graves–and sometimes even burned? Contemporary scholars agree that these cemeteries, always found in the immediate area of a temple dedicated to one of Egypt’s feline goddesses (such as Pahket at Beni Hasan, Bast at Bubastis, and numerous other sites as well), were filled with the mummies of cats purchased by pilgrims and given as votive gifts to the goddess. They had to be put somewhere.
Temple at Beni Hasan
The cats discovered inside these mummy wrappings were the ancestors of today’s Egyptian Mau cats. Some are clearly identifiable as one of the two wildcat sub-species thought to have interbred to eventually produce Egypt’s domestic cats: the jungle cat, Felis chaus, and the African wild cat, Felis silvestris libyca.
African wild cat
Jungle cat
What is a votive gift? We don’t see them much in Western Christianity today. The candles bought and lit alongside the altars in some churches are as close as most of us ever come to this ancient practice. The word “votive” here refers to something given or dedicated as an expression of a wish or desire. In Roman Egypt (which is when ACOOE takes place) the people believed that if they bought a mummified cat and presented it to the temple of a goddess like Bast/Bastet, or Pakhet, the cat’s spirit would join the goddess in the afterlife, where it would continually urge her to bless the giver and answer their prayer, whatever it might be. Of course millions of other animal mummies were given in the same way to their respective gods–snakes, fish, mice, gazelles, ibis, crocodiles, sheep, cattle, falcons, dogs, and even beetles.
Falcon
Gazelle
Ram
Ibis
Snakes in an ibis mummy
Recent research has shown that the popularity of votive mummies increased dramatically after 1000 BCE, when temples’ strict formality relaxed, and common people began to express their own personal piety. As the demand for votive mummies increased, priestly corruption and greed set in, resulting in “mummies” containing no animal at all, only a few bones, or parts of common animals substituted for the bodies of rare ones. In time, some animals came to be bred solely for the mummy trade.
X-ray of kitten mummy inside votive cat figure
Particularly among the cat mummies from Bubastis, archaeologists have discovered a large proportion of young kittens, strangled or with broken necks, placed in adult-size wrappings. Cat remains from Bubastis that were apparently burned rather than mummified are still a mystery. (One tidbit of feline tradition in A Cat Out of Egypt explains such a fictional burning at Leontopolis).
As the description of Beni Hasan makes clear, the mummies in these cemeteries ranged from the ornate and artistically sophisticated to the very simple and carelessly made. The odor described at Beni Hasan certainly would have come from the less carefully-made mummies. Animals mummified as carefully as wealthy humans would have had little or no such odor. (In A Cat Out of Egypt, reference is made to the slip-shod embalming methods used in the production of some votive mummies)
Wood sarcophagus
Wood sarcophagus
Bronze sarcophagus
Wood sarcophagus
A number of the mummies found in Egypt’s cat cemeteries were more carefully constructed. Many were beautifully painted and expensively wrapped. Some were enclosed in wooden caskets, often shaped as cats. Others were placed inside hollow-cast bronze cat figures. With these more complex figures we may be straying into the category of household pets embalmed and presented to the temple as votive offerings by their owners after death, although the presence of kitten mummies in some of these bronze figures (see above) may indicate their origin in the cat mummy trade. So in conclusion, we need to examine the different relationships that existed between cats and humans in early Roman Egypt, and how cat burials reflected those relationships.
Cats and their Egyptian Humans
Two early Greek historians are often quoted in discussions of ancient Egyptian cats: Herodotus (484-425 BCE) and Diodorus Siculus (1st C BCE), although their accounts should probably be approached with some caution. For instance, Herodotus states that it was the established habit of Egyptian cats to run into burning buildings; clearly his reports were not entirely accurate. Similar questions remain in his report of the battle of Pelusium, which, according to Herodotus, the Egyptians conceded to the Persians rather than risk killing the animals the Persians had staked out in their front ranks. How can the contradiction between the respect for ancient cats that both men reported, and the evidence of large-scale cat slaughter in the votive mummy industry be resolved?
Editorial cartoon based on the Battle of Pelusium
Perhaps this discrepancy can be explained by suggesting a kind of class distinction among Egyptian cats, at least as far as humans perceived them. The wild or feral cats who lived on the fringes of society would have been lowest in this order, little different from any other wild or domestic animal routinely hunted or raised for food, and probably bred for use in mummies. Second would have been the domestic cats kept as pets and mousers and generally respected as members of a species ennobled by the gods. Third were the sacred cats, whose status might have been determined either by specific markings–as in the case of the Apis bulls–or by their temple lineage. These cats were not worshiped, but held as sacred because in some way they were embodiments of the goddess. However they were identified, it was probably these cats who were so highly respected in Egypt that, according to Diodorus, a visiting Roman was lynched after accidentally killing a cat. Questions remain as to whether temple priests were permitted to kill cats considered to be sacred. Whatever the truth may be, Weguelin’s “Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat” (below) is likely to be a romantic over-statement.
John Reinhard Weguelin, “The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat,” 1886“Little Mewer’s” sarcophagus
We do know that cats were treasured pets among the ancient Egyptians, and were frequently depicted in their owners’ tombs, as well as being buried with them. They were grieved by their humans as family members when they died. Perhaps the best known of all Egyptian pet cats is Tai Miuwette, “Little Mewer,” the cat beloved of crown prince Thutmose, brother of Akhenaten, whose stone sarcophagus has come down to us. We also know that sometimes these treasured pets were brought to the temples to be embalmed, and sometimes left as votive offerings–but only after natural deaths following long and pampered lives.
A number of early readers of A Cat Out of Egypt have expressed an interest in learning more about the ancient temple of Bast/Bastet at Bubastis. These are readers after my own heart! If you don’t try to understand the world a character lives in, you have little chance of understanding who that person is. Ancient Egypt is a truly an alien land for English-speaking people of the contemporary Western world, even moreso than ancient Israel–thus ACOOE’s many detailed descriptions of ancient Egyptian customs. I hope you’ll find their culture as fascinating as I did.
When I decided to feature an Egyptian temple cat as Yeshua’s childhood companion, I chose Bubastis for three reasons: first, because it was a temple dedicated to the cat goddess Bast/Bastet; second, because descriptions of the temple in the mid 5th C BCE have come down to us in the writings of the historian Herodotus; and third, because Bubastis lies in the general area of the Nile delta where many Jewish settlements existed in the 1st C CE, which made it a likely location for Yeshua’s family.
Bast relief from Bubastis
I decided to refer to the Egyptian goddess Bast/Bastet as “Bast,” rather than “Bastet,” because I wanted to call to mind her earlier persona as a lion goddess. She was usually called “Bastet” by Yeshua’s time, a diminutive form of her original name “Bast,” emphasizing her less threatening aspect as a domestic cat. But she never lost the connection to her earlier self–a self capable of terrifying rage, who stood between the forces of chaos and the sun’s daily rising, as well representing the more fertile and nurturing aspects of a lioness.
The major construction periods archaeologists have been able to identify at Bubastis begin in the Middle Kingdom (roughly 2000 BCE) and continue through the Hyksos dynasty in the mid-to-late second millennium BCE. The entrance hall, festival hall, and hypostyle hall were all likely to have been built during those years, although they probably replaced earlier structures which can’t be identified. Invading Persian forces in the 6th C BCE inflicted heavy damage on many Egyptian temples, including Bubastis. The repairs and new construction undertaken during the 30th Dynasty (Nectanebo and others, 4th C BCE) were probably made necessary by this period of warfare.
“Kom Ombo,” Roberts
Here is a passage describing the temple at Bubastis as Herodotus experienced it around 450 BCE, a hundred years before the addition of the sanctuary hall by Pharaoh Nectanebo:
“Holy Tree,” David Roberts
Save for the entrance, it stands on an island; two separate channels approach it from the Nile, running in contrary directions as far as the entry of the temple; each of them is a hundred feet wide and overshadowed by trees.
The outer court has a height of 60 feet, and is adorned with notable tall figures. The temple is in the midst of the city, the whole circuit of which commands a view down into it; for the city’s level has been raised, but that of the temple has been left as it was, so that it can be seen into from without.
A stone wall runs around it; within it is a grove of very tall trees growing around a great shrine wherein is the image of the goddess; the temple is a square, each side measuring an eighth of a mile. A paved road of almost a half mile’s length leads to the entrance, running eastwards toward the marketplace; this road is about 400 feet wide, and bordered by trees reaching to heaven.
Below you can see a 19th C artist’s rendition of the hypostyle hall at the temple of Hathor at Dendera, which was roughly contemporary with Bubastis.
Like many 19th C efforts, the first major excavation at Bubastis by Edouard Naville was not systematically done–although even then the temple was little more than a field of uneven ground, suggesting the scattered and fallen remains buried beneath the surface. In the photo below you can see clearly the raised ground of the city surrounding the temple area, just as Herodotus described it. The people of the Nile delta made a habit of building up the mounds upon which their towns and cities were built to keep them above the level of the Nile floods, but the monumental nature of their stone temples made such mound-building nearly impossible for them.
Naville’s Excavation, 1887-1889
Unfortunately, major artifacts from Bubastis were carried away to Western museums with little regard for their original placement, although, as ongoing arguments continue to point out, their removal may have preserved them from exposure and vandalism. Many lesser objects were simply cast aside, leaving them vulnerable to theft and weathering. Recent scholars have struggled to piece together the temple’s appearance, both before and after Nectanebo’s changes (350 BCE). Most agree that his major contribution was a new sanctuary area, probably replacing an old one, at the western end of the temple.
The map below reflects a possible plan of the temple area at the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt (30 BCE):
Temple of Bast at Bubastis, map by C.L. Francisco
The festival road, probably lined with sphinxes, approached the temple from east, where it entered the towering pylons that formed the temple’s main gate.
Similar pylons at temple of Isis, Philae
In front of the pylons, two matching granite statues of a Hyksos king (1500 BCE, below) guarded the approach to the temple. Two columns with palm-leaf capitals stood within the gate, which opened into the entrance hall. The entrance hall itself apparently had no columns, much of its space being filled with statues of various pharaohs, including two monumental statues of Ramesses II standing against the inner wall of the pylons. Both the entrance hall, and the festival hall, an enclosure honoring Osorkon II (9th C BCE), were probably built by Osorkon I and/or Osorkon II.
Hyksos Head 1
Hyksos Head 2
Beyond the festival hall was the great hall of columns, or hypostyle hall. The hypostyle hall may have been partially divided into two different segments, but the chaos of the fallen columns makes it difficult to say with any certainty.
Fallen columns at Bubastis
Scholars also disagree as to whether the hall of columns had a ceiling or only epistyles connecting and securing the columns along their tops. There were certainly two types of granite columns discovered–a smaller set with Hathor-head capitals, and a larger set with palm leaf and lotus bud/papyrus capitals. You can see both types of shattered capitals in Naville’s photo above. Below are two intact capitals now in museums.
At the very western end of the temple stood Nectanebo’s 4th C BCE sanctuary hall, entered through a second pair of pylons. The sanctuary hall contained the large central shrine of the goddess Bastet, as well as 7 – 12 smaller shrines along the side and back walls, dedicated to other deities. Most of the sanctuary hall was built of red granite, with floors of basalt. The walls, doors, and ceilings were ornately carved, as was the shrine of the goddess. Stars covered the ceilings.
Starry sky, Hathor temple ceiling, Dendera
The goddess’ shrine, or naos, was carved from a single piece of red granite, approximately 12 feet high and 5 feet wide, with gilded wooden doors opening inward. Based on its available interior space, the goddess’ statue within the naos would have been 4 – 4 ½ feet high. The image would certainly have been overlaid with gold, if not cast of solid gold, and decorated with precious stones, turquoise, and lapis lazuli. Priests dressed her daily in rich clothing.
Reconstruction of Bubastis Naos, photo British Museum
Naos from temple at Edfu
Bast ointment jar
Since the temple map above was created to illustrate the temple as it is described in A Cat Out of Egypt, the chamber of the Great Cat is shown on the map. In reality, there was no such chamber, so far as anyone knows, just as there was probably no Great Cat. But there was a House of Life, as well as gardens, pools, and probably small free-standing temple buildings. Every temple also had its practical buildings, including housing, kitchens, laundries, animal areas, and temple workshops. Bubastis was known for the ointments and perfumes created by its staff as an expression of the goddess’ reputation as Lady of the Ointment Jar, and Mistress of the Embalming House, as well as being renowned for its oracle. There was also an apparently thriving trade in cat mummies at the time ACOOE took place.
“Ezekiel’s Vision”
Bubastis even appears in the writings of the Prophet Ezekiel (Ezek 30:17), when he warns various nations of the wrath to come : “The young men of On and Pi-beseth (Bubastis) shall fall by the sword, and the cities themselves shall go into captivity.” Scholars have speculated that the revels accompanying the annual temple festival at Bubastis may have been responsible for Bubastis’ licentious reputation. Herodotus describes the festival briefly below:
The manner observed in the festival of Bubastis is this: men and women embark promiscuously in great numbers, and during the voyage, some of the women beat upon a tabor, while part of the men play on the pipe, the rest of both sexes singing and striking their hands together at the same time. At every city they find in their passage they bring the boat to land, and some of the women continue their music, but some of the others either provoke the women of the place with opprobrious language, or dance, or draw up their garments; and they do this at every town that stands by the shore. When they arrive at Bubastis, they celebrate the festival with numerous sacrifices, and consume more wine than in all the rest of the year. For the inhabitants say this assembly usually consists of about 700,000 men and women, besides children.
The feline narrator of A Cat Out of Egypt has her own ideas about the festival.
Grace . . .
