Nyx in the House of Night by Jordan Dane Read Free Book Online Page B

against the law to take cats out of Egypt, but Phoenician traders managed to smuggle them into Rome, where they became very popular for their ability to kill mice and rats. But as they became more common throughout the ancient world, they were no longer considered quite so divine.
The Jaguar God
T he Egyptians weren’t the only culture who held cats sacred. Tepeyollotl, worshipped by Mexico’s Aztec and Zapotec peoples as well as in Guatemala, was described as a monster jaguar who would leap out and seize the setting sun. His name meant “Heart of the Mountains” or the “Lord of the Mountains.” The jaguar, like Bast, was connected with vegetation and fertility.
    Here’s the thing about gods and goddesses: they’re shape-shifters of a sort. They’ve been around for millennia, and over time, as populations have moved from place to place (by force or by choice), or as the needs of the culture changed, the gods have moved and changed, too. They’re given different names, but the “new” gods or goddesses often take on the powers of the old. One example of this is Bast taking on the powers of Isis and Osiris, as some scholars think Bast is just the feline form of Isis. Sekhmet, too, is believed by some to be just another aspect of Bast, her shadow or dark twin. Scholars believe that in ancient Greece, the cat goddess became known as Artemis, the moon goddess and hunter; and in Rome, she became Diana. Artemis was not a sun god at all—those powers were given to her twin brother, Apollo—but she was a virgin goddess who ruled over the moon, like Bast, and childbirth, like Sekhmet. Though the cat was only one of the animals Artemis was associated with, when the giant Typhon stormed Olympus and the terrified gods fled to Egypt, each of them disguised in animal form, Artemis took the form of a cat.
    What we see here is a concept that’s at the heart of the House of Night series—the idea that the Goddess has been with us since the dawn of time, taking on different forms in different cultures. She has been known as Isis and Bast and Sekhmet, Nyx and Artemis and Hecate and Selene, Freya and Hel, and eventually Mary, mother of Christ. From the Egyptians on, cats were connected with many of these forms of the goddess. But as Goddess worship fell out of favor, so did cats.
    CAT FAMILIARS
“Ah! cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we can be aware of. It comes no doubt from their being so familiar with warlocks and witches.”
—Sir Walter Scott
    During the Middle Ages, the old religions of Ancient Greece and Rome, and of pagan Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany, gave way to Christianity. The church was determined that it be the one and only religion, and so it took over sites sacred to other faiths. Churches were built where shrines, sacred woods, or sacred wells once stood, and many things connected with these earlier religions—especially the worship of the Goddess and nature spirits—were demonized.
    We can see this clearly in the evolution of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, fertility, and marriage, a sort of Scandinavian Aphrodite with traces of Bast. Freya was also a warrior goddess. After a battle, she led the god Odin’s handmaidens to the battlefields so they could choose the most valorous among those slain and lead them to Odin’s hall, Valhalla. It was Freya’s right to claim half of those who had died and bring them to her hall, Sessrumnir, a heavenly afterlife where the dead warriors experienced so much pleasure that wives and sisters were said to join them in battle, hoping they’d also wind up in Freya’s hall. (Those chosen for Valhalla would have to get ready to fight all over again in Ragnarok, the great, final battle the Norse believed would result in the destruction of the world. Really, wouldn’t you rather go with the goddess?)
    Freya had several ways of traveling, but her best-known was a chariot drawn by two cats. Some sources say