animal
Cat
Cat as an animal people have named and used. Independence, Mystery, Intuition — one living kind, not a single symbol.
Egyptian religion
Cat appears in Egyptian religion.
Herodotus’s Egyptian logos treats cats among sacred and household animals with mourning customs. A named cat in that traveler’s speech, not Bastet as an unminted deity id and not a modern pet dump.
from Herodotus · Histories, c. 440s BCE
appears in · sourced · documented
Cat is sacred to Bastet.
The Book of the Dead’s protective feline image-world seats the cat as Bastet’s animal — sacred dedication in that corpus, not a generic cat appears_in egyptian alone and not a Sekhmet lion flatten.
from Raymond O. Faulkner (translation) · Book of the Dead, New Kingdom spells; Faulkner trans. 1972
sacred to · sourced · culturally specific
Norse tradition
Cat appears in Norse tradition.
Snorri’s Gylfaginning seats Freyja among a chariot drawn by cats when she rides out. A named cat-kind in that prose, not freyja as the goddess alone and not a generic independence-meme dump.
from Snorri Sturluson · Gylfaginning, c. 1220
appears in · sourced · documented
Cat is sacred to Freyja.
Snorri’s Gylfaginning has Freyja’s chariot drawn by cats. A named animal dedicated to that goddess’s riding, not cat→appears_in→norse as the kind walk alone and not Freyr’s boar under a sibling flatten.
from Snorri Sturluson · Gylfaginning, c. 1220
sacred to · sourced · documented
sources
- Histories · Herodotus
Herodotus, Histories.
- Gylfaginning · Snorri Sturluson
Snorri Sturluson, Gylfaginning, in the Prose Edda.
- Book of the Dead · Raymond O. Faulkner (translation)
Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.