Why Ancient Egypt worshipped cats

Introduction. In Ancient Egypt, cats were fed royal diets, adorned with jewels, and considered the vessel of Gods. Upon death, they were often mummified. Camille Paglia, an art critic and philosopher, explains why cats were dear to Egyptians in Sexual Personae (1991) 👇

Paglia believes that each civilization is a new attempt to balance nature with society. Paglia calls the social order Apollonian, and the chaos of nature Dionysian. We need the raw materials of nature but also need to survive her tantrums when she's "throwing her weight around."

The Egyptians venerated cats as they are a near-perfect balance between Apollo - the God of order and Dionysus - the deity of chaos. Cats have a sense of beauty and proportion - Apollonian traits. But they love to be unpredictably aggressive - like Dionysian nature herself.

Cat's Dionysian qualities: The "house cat" is wilder than other house pets as it was the "the last animal domesticated by man." Civilization is built in the light, but cats are "uncanny creatures of the night." Paglia: "Cats dwell in the occult, that is, the hidden."

Cats mirror the benevolence and hostility of nature: "They live by and for fear, practicing being scared or spooking humans by sudden rushings and ambushes." Cats sleep "up to twenty of every twenty-four hours," moving in a dream world where Apollonian logic is not welcome.

But cats have an aesthetic sense: "When it is disheveled, its spirits fall. Cats have a sense of pictorial composition: they station themselves symmetrically on chairs, rugs, even a sheet of paper on the floor. Cats adhere to an Apollonian metric of mathematical space."

The cat combines its Dionysian love of the dark with its Apollonian love of the spotlight: "But it also fashionably loves to see and be seen; it is a spectator of life’s drama, amused, condescending." When ignored, it interrupts your activities with great pomp, getting attention.

The Egyptians honored crocodiles for the same reason they worshiped cats: the crocodile inhabits two worlds. The croc undertakes a "daily passage between two realms" - moving between "water and earth." It's equally at ease with the orderly gravity of land & the watery underworld.

There's a logic behind the Christian dislike of cats: "In the Middle Ages, they were hunted and killed for their association with witches." For Paglia, Christianity is an Apollonian enterprise seeking cosmic order - a project at odds with the cat's innate Dionysian energy.

Cats resonated with the Egyptian spirit because cats embody a fusion of the Apollonian & Dionysian energies. Paglia writes: "Through the cat, Egypt defined and refined its complex aesthetic." Cats showed Egypt that a "unique synthesis" of two warring principles was possible.