Category Archives: pets

Another wind: Grief and the passing of Mari

Mari: In Memorium

 

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.

“Slipping Away,” image CL Francisco

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Memoriam: Mari

 

Fifteen years was not enough . . .

image by CL Francisco

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.

 

 

 

 

Life in the Medical Wilderness

 

Image CL Francisco

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.net
Image 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.

Image CL Francisco

 

 

 

 

A Christmas Greeting from Yeshua’s Cats

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.

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“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.

“As do you and I.”

 

"Shepherds' Star," C. L. Francisco
“Shepherds’ Star,” C. L. Francisco

 

May you all have a blessed Christmas!

 

Cat Mummies of Ancient Egypt

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 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:

cat-mummies
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.

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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
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.

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.

Snakes in an ibis mummy
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
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)

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
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
John Reinhard Weguelin, “The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat,” 1886
"Little Mewer's" sarcophagus
“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.

 

 

 

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The Temple of Bast at Bubastis

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.

EgyptDeltaMapWhen 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
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.

David_Roberts_The_Temple_Of_Kom_Ombo_
“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:

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“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.

Temple_Dendera
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
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
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
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.

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
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
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.

 

Bast ointment jar
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," Raphael
“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.

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To get a more detailed–and accurate–view of the discoveries at Bubastis, I recommend the ongoing blog of the Tell Basta excavation team.

Click on the following link for a downloadable pdf of the British Museum’s publication, A Naos of Nekhthorheb from Bubastis.

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Author C. L. Francisco’s blog — home of Yeshua’s Cats!

 

 

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Sleeping with Bacchus: cats and stress

 

PF-Moving-house_GettyMoving: nobody likes it. It’s unsettling, disorienting, chaotic. Every stress scale includes it. If you live within a tight budget it’s also appallingly hard work. And the older you get, the greater the possibilities of personal disaster. The specters of back injury and clinical exhaustion pile onto the routine risks of things broken or left behind, toes smashed, muscles strained, and near-death experiences driving top-heavy, tank-like vehicles. And I speak from a continent of experience.

When humans move, we understand why we do it, although it’s never easy, and seldom without pain. But what about the animals who share our lives, who go because we go? No, let’s be more specific: what about our cats?

Morgan
Morgan

We had finally been forced to leave our fire-scarred land for a new home, and the year was turning toward the 2nd anniversary of my cat Morgan’s death, which had resulted from the stress of our original flight from the wildfire.  And that meant I was also approaching the 2nd anniversary of my mother’s death (she died a week after Morgan).

Trauma makes tracks in our memories, links among synapses like connections in a railroad switching yard: a mental switch is thrown, direction changes imperceptibly, and we find ourselves traveling a road wearing the smooth semblance of the here and now, but invisibly cracked and pitted with old emotion. The unseen past trips us with its rubbled pain and creates new trauma where none need be: a trick of the mind, and one that caught me off-guard.

I had adopted a pair of kittens from a local shelter not long after Morgan’s death. From his earliest days, the male, Bacchus, had a sweetness I’d rarely encountered in a cat before, and I loved him beyond reason. When we moved to Colorado, he developed a urinary infection in the first weeks. I watched him closely, and began to see symptoms like Morgan’s appearing. When he strained to urinate for over a minute with no success I packed him into his carrying case and took him to the vet. Probably stress-related from the move, the vet said, and my heart quaked.

Bacchus
Bacchus

Stress. We talk about it all the time. Most of us are sure we have too much of it. We assume we understand what it is, but the word can mean at least four different things:

  1. in physics, force per unit area;
  2. in language, emphasis on a word;
  3. in psychology, emotional discomfort produced by external and/or internal circumstances;
  4. in biology, a stimulus that generates a state of heightened physiological response, and the physiological and anatomical consequences of that response.

The familiar buzzword is #3. Most people are aware of #2, some are superficially familiar with #1 from news reports on structural collapses after earthquakes, but I doubt that many people without biological or medical training are aware of #4.

The vets I consulted about Morgan and Bacchus almost certainly spoke in biological terms—but what I heard was pop psychology. I went away believing that the emotional terrors of moving were direct causes of both infections. We were speaking subtly different languages.

Photo by Hannibal Poenaru
Photo by Hannibal Poenaru

FlightThere are two basic scenarios for biological stress: the perceived threat can be real, or it can be imagined. If the threat in the stimulus is real, then running away or fighting will relieve the stress, and the body can return to normal. But when the threat is imagined, the situation is more complex. If, as in Bacchus’ case, a cat perceives a threat in a new environment, but neither fight nor flight is possible, his body is unable to relax from the heightened response, and the stress is prolonged and unresolved. So he remains in a state of inappropriate physiological alert to the stimulus of this new environment for days and weeks. Such stress has an exhausting effect over time.

Apparently, Bacchus’ response to feeling lousy from the extended time on high alert was to stop drinking water. An unfortunate choice, since he then started building up uric acid in his system, which caused bladder inflammation and pain, making him think he needed to urinate when he didn’t—with the result that he felt worse and even less inclined to drink anything, and became dehydrated.

Morgan-Bacchus collage
Morgan-Bacchus collage

By the time I packed Bacchus into his carrying case, my emotional train had already switched tracks without my awareness: I was sure I was rushing to save his life, but in fact I was caught up in a replay of the trauma of the wildfire and Morgan’s illness and death. Judgment and clear-sightedness had fallen away. As for Bacchus, taking him to the vet was probably the worst thing I could have done. Already suffering from the effects of physiological stress because of our move, he found himself suddenly moved again, but this time abandoned in a strange vet’s kennel, with neither his human nor his sister for comfort. Suddenly his life had gotten much worse.

Bacchus stayed overnight at the clinic, but by midmorning the next day he had produced no urine sample, so the vet used a needle to draw urine from his bladder. It hurt, and Bacchus vomited. Concerned that shock was a possibility, the vet hydrated him, analyzed the urine, and sent him back home with some antibiotics. At 2 AM Bacchus began to stagger and vomit. He was going into shock.

Shock is a sudden and drastic drop in blood pressure that is usually fatal if not reversed quickly. It is commonly caused by an extreme reaction to threatening stimuli, great blood loss, or pain—any of which will have greater impact if the animal is already dehydrated. Immediate intravenous fluids are the only effective treatment for a cat in shock, so I rushed Bacchus to an emergency clinic twenty miles away. He barely made it, but they saved his life.

If I had responded to Bacchus’ symptoms with a little thought and research instead of recycled panic, I could have taken special care to be sure he drank enough water and watched him closely for a couple of days. Perhaps he never had an infection—just inflammation. By taking him to the vet, I subjected him to greatly increased stress and dehydration, and when the vet drew urine, Bacchus was frightened by the pain. I might as well have been setting him up to go into shock.

Cat’s Nightmare, C.L. Francisco
Cat’s Nightmare, C.L. Francisco

The odd thing about the whole situation is that neither Bacchus nor I engaged with actual events. Bacchus responded to threat where there was only sudden change, and I was running on fear laid down by a similar trauma in my past. In a sense we were both sleepwalking, moving through self-created dreamspace.

My emotional overreaction to Bacchus’ stress probably added to his difficulties. A cat’s human is rather like a parent, and the cat looks to his human to assess danger and alert him to its presence. My alarm at Bacchus’ health issues and my ongoing anxiety over his well-being undoubtedly communicated their message to him: “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” And his stress increased.

Sad cat in cage, by Giordano
Sad cat in cage, by Giordano

I suspect the vet realized that if the feedback loop of Bacchus’ stress response couldn’t be interrupted, Bacchus would not recover. So after hydrating him for 36 hours he told me to come get him and take him home. When I approached the cage, Bacchus was lying in the back corner, looking much like he looked when he went into shock: almost dead. I knelt down and called his name, and he growled and hissed without even opening his eyes. I unlatched the cage door and called him again, and his eyes flew open as if he really heard me that time. But when I reached in and picked him up, he snarled and spat and tried to scratch me. At last, as I pulled him out and held him close, he relaxed and began to burrow into my neck.

Bacchus
Bacchus

I recognized the pattern and felt sudden shame. By permitting old trauma to derail me from the reality of the present, I had opened a door for Bacchus to do the same. Now we were both sleeping the troubled sleep of past pain reliving itself in the present. Did he hear someone call his name? Terror. Was someone picking him up? Pain soon to come. He was snared by a shock different from what nearly killed him—he was suffering from incipient post-traumatic shock.

Each day after he came home he grew a little stronger. Kitty water bowls bloomed throughout the house, tempting him to drink. He started eating and drinking, and soon he even romped a bit. I worked relentlessly at monitoring and releasing my own anxiety. Now, more than 5 years later, he still flinches at any sudden noise or movement, but otherwise he’s my warm, loveable friend.

Miner’s Canary
Miner’s Canary

Bacchus granted me a rare inside look at the damage we inflict on ourselves and others when the landscape around us is transformed by our own emotions.  The animals who share our space mirror more than our care and grooming. They are individuals with interwoven multilevel awareness like ours. But unlike our human relations, they suffer in silence, never accusing us, allowing us to see how we hurt them without triggering our defensiveness and self-justification.

If we let ourselves see them clearly, they can be our counselors, even our guides. But too often they are only our miners’ canaries, dying in vain to warn us of inner toxins we have ignored until escape is impossible.

Bacchus Today
Bacchus Today

Thanks to the One, it wasn’t too late for Bacchus or for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Wildfire that Birthed Yeshua’s Cat

A number of people have asked me to share more about the wildfire that resulted in the death of the young cat whose memory lies behind Mari in The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat. This is the story of that wildfire.

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Killing drought followed years of plentiful rainfall. Temperatures spiked into the 100’s and refused to drop. Creeks ran low. The odor of pine resin hung heavy in the air. A dry lightning strike—and a rancher who didn’t take it seriously enough—provided the critical mass, and two weeks later wildfire had consumed 40,000 acres of forest, pastures, and homes.

FireCloudSB2We dismissed the first smoke rising behind the buttes as nothing more than a wayward cloud, never imagining that the storm building there would explode into a holocaust. The days that followed dragged by in anxious succession. Winds dropped, and then blew up again out of nowhere. The fire turned back on itself, only to gather strength and roar off in another direction. Waves of rumor obliterated facts.

 

One night we drove out to watch the fire’s progress from a nearby ridge. News pictures of fire-lit nightscapes are commonplace now, but for us 8 years ago the scene was nothing less than apocalyptic. Small refugee animals fleeing the fire choked the dirt roads as we steered a path among them.  I remember the porcupines best, humping their way in unseemly haste through the sullen light. Lines of flame spreading across the black ridges looked like flowing lava. The images presented themselves to our visual processors as nonsense, unreadable data. Nothing in our lives had prepared us for this.

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First we evacuated the horses, just in case. We found carriers for the dogs and cats and set them by the doors. When the call came, we were as ready as we could have been, but we had room for little but the animals, basic clothing, toiletries, and our computers. Then for a week of endless days we waited in a small motel on a busy highway 30 miles away.

IMG_3972 Dark ravine rootsWhy our home didn’t burn will always remain a mystery. The firefighters abandoned their efforts in the face of high winds and encircling fire. We were advised to expect a total loss. But in the end, the flames stopped as if by divine fiat all along the wire pasture fences that enclosed our buildings. Sap melted out of the old redwood paneling in my house from the heat, but only the land burned—the land and something deep in the flesh of my small black cat.

 

Morgan, cat of quiet pine groves that she was, probably hadn’t ever been in any building other than my house, and certainly never a motel on a busy highway. For a week she hardly came out from under the bed. No matter what I tried, she refused to eat, and she probably didn’t drink. By the time we returned to the still-smoldering ruins of our forest, she had a urinary infection. No medication touched it, and she grew steadily weaker, until at last the vet tested her for feline leukemia. The results were positive: she’d probably been born with it. All options vanished. The vet’s theory, and a sound one from what I’ve heard, was that the physical stress of her changed environment roused the sleeping disease into burning life. She might have stood a better chance if I’d left her behind to survive the wildfire on her own.

Within two months of the fire, Morgan was dead. I buried her in the charred grove where we had planned to build a small chapel. Beneath boughs once sweet with resin, in smoke-filled light and brittle shade, I laid her under the endless sky. And I grieved.

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Morgan in her last week with friend Toby (Photoshop design, “Doorway Into Forever”)

Burnt trees FP2But the grief had really begun when the vet first placed the figurative black cloth on his head and passed sentence of death. A dead forest surrounded me. My gentle cat was fading away in my arms. Eventually I gathered courage and resumed my walks beneath beloved trees, now wasted skeletons streaked with amber tears.

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I remember shutting my heart against the echoes of pain that surely must lie in ambush along those charcoaled aisles. But as weeks passed, only woodland stillness reigned. Blowing ash darkened the sun—smoke without fire, forest lives airborne—but already the forest’s heart was turning to the east. Life was emerging from death.

 

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Blasted meadows were greening. Tenacious pines, seared but stubborn, drank deep to gather strength for life. Fire-crimsoned cones dropped seed. Seedlings broke the fragile soil. *

 

 

 

I found comfort in the cycle of life, and even in death..

 

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Somehow over the next five years, Morgan’s death, questions about the Creator’s on-going involvement in non-human nature, the timing of Jesus’ coming in human history, and the redemption of the suffering Earth—all came together into the creation of Yeshua’s Cat. The spiritual doubts that had plagued my heart for years ripened and bore sweet fruit.

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I’ll continue the story of this journey in a few weeks. Come back soon!

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* To read about the devastating effects of salvage logging on the recovery of burned forests, click here.

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Watching for the Return of the Light

My sister-in-law Wendy Francisco (who did the art for Yeshua’s Cat’s front cover) has insisted that I would find myself adding new pages to the Cat from time to time, and I have equally firmly replied that I never would. Well, Wendy won. Over the last two or three weeks that unmistakable nudge (much like a cat butting her head against your chest) has been growing more insistent.

And, Donna West, it was your kind comment on my post about the cat who inspired the book that pushed the nudge into actual words, drawing me out of the busy-ness of publishing concerns and back into Mari’s world.

So, I wish each of you a blessed Christmas, and as a gift from Mari to you, here are a few new words from her, never published before–perhaps for some later edition.

For those of you who have the paperback edition, this 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.

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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.

“As do you and I.”

 

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