Daniel's continuing the festival series, and this one he wants us to actually walk through. The Festival of Bastet at Bubastis, ancient Egypt. He's asking what the lead-up looked like, what you'd see in the streets, whether the whole thing was basically a sanctioned break from being a functioning adult. And he's right that it doesn't get the same press as the Bacchanalia, which is strange, because by the one account we have, this was the biggest party in Egypt.
Herodotus puts it at the top of the list. He names five or six major Egyptian festivals and says the one at Bubastis is the chiefest and the most zealously celebrated. That's his phrase. And then he drops a number that I still don't know what to do with. Seven hundred thousand people. Men and women, not counting children. He says the natives told him that.
Seven hundred thousand. In a city in the Nile Delta.
Which is either nonsense or the largest pilgrimage on record for the ancient world. The honest read is that Herodotus never claims to have counted. He's repeating what locals told him. But even if you cut it in half, you're still talking about a city that normally held maybe a fraction of that, suddenly absorbing a floating population the size of a modern metropolis.
And the floating part is literal. That's the detail that got me. Nobody walked there.
No, the journey was the festival. That's the thing Daniel's asking about with the lead-up. You didn't travel to Bubastis and then start celebrating. The celebration began the moment your boat pushed off from whatever town you lived in. Herodotus describes it as a flotilla. Men and women together in every boat, and he's specific about the instruments. The women had rattles, krotala, and they shook them for the entire voyage. Some of the men played flutes the whole time. Everyone else sang and clapped.
So you're on the Nile for however many days it takes to get from wherever you live to the Delta, and there is no quiet hour. There's no point where someone says, let's rest our voices for the evening.
Right, and the river is the main highway of Egypt. Everyone's traveling the same direction at the same time. So you're not alone on the water. You're in a traffic jam of boats, all of them making noise, all of them packed with people who have already started drinking. And the boats are not all the same size. Some are little reed skiffs, some are bigger cargo barges that people have converted for the week. You'd see families, neighbors, people who pooled money to rent something larger.
And then the towns.
This is the part that always gets me. Every time the boats came opposite a town along the bank, they put in to shore. The whole flotilla. And the women would keep up the music, but some of them would start shouting insults at the women of that town. Jeering at them. Then some would dance, and some would stand up and pull up their garments.
Which is the line every modern summary quotes, and usually gets wrong.
It does. The popular version is that this was a general atmosphere of debauchery, men and women together, everybody letting loose. But read Herodotus carefully. The jeering and the exposure are done by the pilgrim women, and they're aimed at the women in the towns they're passing. It's women mocking other women. That's a very specific ritual inversion. It's not a free-for-all. It's targeted.
So imagine being a woman in one of those riverside towns. You're standing on the bank, watching this flotilla go by, and the women on the boats are specifically calling you out. Not the men. You.
And the boats stop. They don't just shout from midstream and float on. They put in to shore so this can happen properly. Every town along the entire route. Herodotus says every city along the riverbank.
That's a strange thing to do to people you don't know, unless the point is that they're not really strangers. These are probably people from neighboring communities, or extended family, or trading partners. The Nile connects all these towns. So the festival creates this temporary structure where you get to say things to the next town over that you'd never say in ordinary life.
Egyptologist Geraldine Pinch puts it bluntly. She says women were freed from all constraints during the annual festival at Bubastis. They celebrated by drinking, dancing, making music, and displaying their genitals. Her word. And she frames it as exactly that, a freedom from constraints. Not a lapse. A scheduled release.
Which is the answer to Daniel's third question. Do you basically get to give up on working and being serious people for a while? Yes. But it's not anarchy. It's licensed. The license comes from the goddess herself.
And that's where the Bacchanalia comparison gets interesting. The Bacchanalia was a secretive mystery cult. You had to be initiated. It happened at night, in private gatherings. Rome eventually decided it was a conspiracy and crushed it. The Senate passed a decree, rounded people up, executed thousands. The Bastet festival was the opposite. It was public, it was state-tolerated, it was the biggest event on the calendar. Everyone was expected to be there. The misrule was the point, and it was scheduled.
So why does one get a crackdown and the other get a temple complex the size of a stadium?
Because the Egyptians had a theological framework for it. The misrule wasn't a breakdown of order. It was a reenactment. There's a myth, the Eye of Ra, preserved in some demotic papyri from the second century BCE. The story is that the daughter of Ra, a lioness goddess, gets enraged and storms off to Nubia. And the god Thoth has to bring her back. He doesn't argue with her. He doesn't fight her. He brings music and dance and alcohol, and he soothes her with them. The drunkenness and the ecstatic behavior are what please the goddess. They're how you calm the furious divine feminine.
So getting drunk is theology.
Getting drunk is doing the ritual correctly. The ARCE material on this is good. They call the excess willful violations of accepted social standards, and then they connect it directly to lioness goddesses. Bastet, Sekhmet, Mut, Hathor. These goddesses are dangerous when they're angry. The festival is the mechanism for keeping them happy.
Which reframes the whole thing. You're not partying because the rules are off. You're partying because the rules have been replaced by a different set of rules. And the new rules require you to be louder, drunker, and more indecent than you'd ever normally be.
And if you don't, you're not fully participating in the ritual. The woman who stays quiet on the boat, who keeps her garments down, who doesn't drink, she's not being virtuous. She's failing to do what the goddess wants.
Let's get to Bubastis itself. Daniel asked what we'd encounter roaming the streets. What does the city actually look like when you arrive?
The temple complex is the centerpiece, and Herodotus gives us a description that reads like a travel brochure. The temple sits surrounded by water except at the entrance. Two canals branch off from the Nile and run around it, each a hundred feet wide, lined with trees. The entrance has propylaea, these monumental gateways, sixty feet high, with sculptures nine feet tall carved on them.
Sixty feet is six stories.
And the temple itself is square, a stadium on each side. A Greek stadium is about six hundred feet. So you've got a building that's six hundred by six hundred feet, inside a moat, approached through gateways taller than most buildings in the city. And then there's the processional road. Three stadia long, about four hundred feet broad, lined with very tall trees, running east from the temple through the marketplace to the temple of Hermes, which is what Herodotus calls Thoth.
Four hundred feet wide. That's not a road. That's a parade ground.
It's designed for exactly this. You can march an army down it, or you can process a goddess's barque with thousands of people on either side. And the market is right there, because a festival of this size is also a commercial event. You've got seven hundred thousand people, if we believe the number, all needing food and drink and offerings and souvenirs. The economy of Bubastis must have run on this festival the way a ski town runs on winter.
What are they buying? What's the street scene?
Wine, mostly. Herodotus has the line that gets quoted more than any other. More wine of grapes is consumed upon that festival than during the whole of the rest of the year. The entire rest of the year. One city, one festival, outdrinks the whole country for the other three hundred and sixty some days.
Which is either an absurd exaggeration or a statement about how little wine most Egyptians drank normally. Beer was the everyday drink. Wine was more of an elite thing, or a festival thing. So if you concentrate a year's worth of wine consumption into one week in one city, you get a very specific kind of crowd.
You get a city where the streets are full of people who are not used to drinking wine, drinking wine in large quantities, in the heat of the Delta. And the festival is in the spring, roughly March by the official calendar, though the calendar drifts. So it's warm. You've got boats still arriving, people disembarking, looking for somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, somewhere to buy more wine. The noise level must have been extraordinary.
And the cats.
Oh, the cats. Bubastis was the principal depository of cat mummies in Egypt. This is the city of the cat goddess, and it's also a giant feline necropolis. Dead cats from all over Egypt were embalmed and brought here for burial. So you've got this bizarre combination. The party capital of Egypt and the cemetery for the nation's cats, in the same place, at the same time.
So you're drunk in the street, and three doors down there's a temple workshop where they're mummifying cats.
And pilgrims might be doing both things in the same trip. Bring the family cat that died last year, have it properly embalmed and buried at Bubastis, and then go join the flotilla and drink yourself into a stupor. Honor the goddess in both modes. The domestic, protective Bastet, and the wild, lioness Bastet.
That's the thing people miss about Bastet. She starts as a lioness. The cute cat image comes later. So the festival isn't a celebration of the house cat. It's a celebration of the dangerous feline, the one that could kill you, being soothed into something approachable.
And the sacred climax of the whole thing, the actual religious high point, was probably the rowing of Bastet's barque on the Isheru, those sacred canals around the temple. There's a papyrus from the seventh century BCE, Papyrus Brooklyn forty-seven point two eighteen, that describes Bastet rescuing the Eye of Horus from Seth at Bubastis, and then being rowed within the Oryx-Antelope on the Isheru in her moment of triumph. So the goddess's statue, in her boat, is rowed around the temple canals while the crowd watches from the banks.
What would a pilgrim actually feel at that moment? You've spent days on the river, you've jeered at strangers, you've drunk more wine than you've had all year, you've bought offerings, you've maybe buried a cat. And now you're standing at the edge of a hundred-foot-wide canal, watching the goddess's barque go by.
I think you'd feel like the whole thing had been building to exactly this. The noise, the drinking, the music, all of it is preparation. The myth says the goddess is soothed by these things. So when the barque appears, you're not just watching a parade. You're seeing the result of your own participation. You helped make this moment possible.
And what happens after? The festival ends, the boats go home.
That's the part nobody writes down. Herodotus doesn't tell us about the hangover, the trip back, the cleanup. But you can imagine it. Hundreds of thousands of people, exhausted, dehydrated, broke, trying to get back on boats and sail home. The river full of debris. The city's sanitation system, whatever it was, completely overwhelmed.
A week later, Bubastis is a ghost town again. The temple staff are sweeping up, the cat embalmers are back to their normal volume, the wine sellers are counting their money and sleeping for three days.
And the social order snaps back. That's the part I find most interesting. The inversion is temporary by design. The woman who jeered at her neighbor from the boat goes back to being a farmer's wife or a weaver or whatever she was. The rules come back on. And everyone accepts that, because the rules were never actually abolished. They were just suspended, on purpose, for a fixed period.
Which is different from how we think about festivals now. Modern festivals are escapes. You go to them to get away from your life. This was the opposite. You went to it to fulfill an obligation. The party was mandatory.
And the obligation was to the goddess. You owed her the drunkenness, the music, the laughter. If you didn't give it, she might not be soothed. And a goddess who isn't soothed is a lioness who's still angry.
Daniel's framing this as a continuation of the outrageous festivals series. What makes this one outrageous isn't just the drinking or the exposure. It's the scale and the organization. This wasn't a bacchanal in the woods. This was a state function.
With a budget, presumably. Someone had to maintain those canals, repair the processional road, stock the temple storehouses. The state was invested in this. The pharaoh's administration, the temple priesthood, the local officials, they all had a role in making it happen. This is the opposite of a spontaneous party.
So the lead-up, to answer Daniel's question directly, is a river journey that's already the festival. You pack food and wine and instruments, you get on a boat with your neighbors, and from the moment you cast off, you're in it. The music doesn't stop. The drinking starts early. And every town you pass, you stop and perform this ritual of mockery and exposure aimed at the women on shore. That's day one, day two, however long the trip takes.
And then you arrive. The temple looms over everything, surrounded by water, approached through those massive gateways. The streets are packed. The wine is flowing. The processional road is full of people. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the goddess's barque is rowed around the sacred canals, and that's the moment the whole thing has been building toward.
And yes, you get to give up on working and being serious. But it's not a vacation. It's a duty.
Hilbert: Binder clips.
Sorry?
Hilbert: Binder clips. Box of a hundred. Office supply store in Zagazig, nineteen eighty-four. I was doing inventory for a textile warehouse that supplied the souvenir stands out near Tell Basta, the modern site. The owner, a man named Farouk, used to stock up on binder clips every September because the festival season brought the tourists and the tourists bought papyrus prints and the prints had to be clipped to the display boards. He'd buy a hundred boxes. By March, they were gone.
Wait, you worked in Zagazig?
Hilbert: Six months. The warehouse was on the road to the tell. I'd drive past the old temple site every morning. There's not much left now. Some granite blocks, a few cat statues in the local museum. But the canals Herodotus describes, you can still see the depressions in the fields. The water's gone, but the shape is there.
So you were living next to Bubastis and working in office supplies.
Hilbert: Farouk also sold wine. That was a side thing. He had a cousin who made date wine out near the Delta. Every March, Farouk would load a truck with crates of the stuff and drive it to the tell. He said the modern festival, the local one, still drew a crowd. Nothing like seven hundred thousand. A few thousand maybe. But the drinking was the same. He said the date wine was terrible, but people bought it because it was festival wine. They expected it to be rough.
That's a continuity I hadn't considered. The local festival at Tell Basta surviving into the modern era.
Hilbert: It was a saint's festival by then. Different name, same shape. People came from the surrounding villages, they brought food, they drank, the women had their own songs. Farouk said the women still sang the old songs, but he didn't know what the words meant. Nobody did. They just knew you sang them at the festival.
That's the thing about these inversions. They outlive the theology. The goddess goes away, the saint shows up, but the party stays in the same spot on the calendar.
Hilbert: Farouk sold the warehouse in nineteen eighty-six. Moved to Cairo. I heard he opened a papyrus shop near the museum. I still have a box of those binder clips. They're in a cupboard somewhere.
The clips are a strange thing to keep.
Hilbert: They were good clips. German steel.
The point about the songs, though. That's what gets me. A ritual can lose its meaning and keep its form. The women singing words nobody understands, still doing it because that's what you do at the festival. That's the same mechanism as the jeering at the riverside towns. The original reason might have been forgotten even by Herodotus's time. He records the behavior, but he doesn't explain it. He just says it happens.
And the Egyptians he talked to probably couldn't have explained it either. They just knew it was part of the thing. The theology was the priestly class's job. The average pilgrim just knew you got on the boat, you drank, you sang, and when you passed a town, the women did that thing. It was tradition.
Hilbert: Farouk's cousin, the date wine man, he had a theory. He said the jeering was about fertility. You shout at the women in the next town to wake them up, make them fertile. Like throwing rice at a wedding. He said the skirt thing was the same. Showing them what they're supposed to use.
That's a folk interpretation, but it's not crazy. The connection to fertility and the home is core to Bastet's later identity. The domestic cat, the protector of women and children.
The trouble is we don't have the emic explanation. We have Herodotus, who's an outsider, and we have the demotic papyri, which are about the myth, not the street-level ritual. The actual participants didn't write down why they did what they did. They just did it.
Hilbert: Farouk said the modern women at the saint's festival did a dance that looked like rowing. They'd stand in a line and sway and move their arms like they were pulling oars. He said it was probably from the old boat procession. The barque going around the canals. Somebody, a long time ago, turned the rowing into a dance, and the dance outlived the boat.
Even the sacred climax, the rowing of the barque, survives as a folk dance at a saint's festival in the Delta.
Hilbert: Farouk thought so. He wasn't an archaeologist. He was a man who sold wine and binder clips. But he watched the women dance every March for thirty years, and he said it was the same motion. Back and forth. Like rowing.
That's the kind of detail you don't get from a temple inscription. The gesture surviving, detached from its meaning.
Hilbert: The date wine is gone now. Farouk's cousin died in the nineties. The recipe died with him. Farouk said it was mostly dates and water and a lot of sugar, left in a clay jar for six months. It came out brown and thick. You had to cut it with water or it would give you a headache that lasted two days.
There's the real continuity with the ancient festival. The headache.
Hilbert: Farouk used to say the ancient Egyptians drank better wine than his cousin's. He said they had vineyards in the Delta, proper grapes. The date wine was a poor man's substitute. But the poor men were the ones who came to the festival, so the date wine sold.
Herodotus says the festival wine was grape wine. So somewhere in the supply chain, there was a whole industry of vineyards and wine transport feeding into Bubastis every spring. That's a lot of infrastructure for a religious event.
Which brings us back to the scale. Seven hundred thousand people, if that number is even remotely right, means the Delta's agricultural output had to support a temporary city. The logistics alone would have been a full-time job for the temple administration.
The cat mummies. Don't forget those. If pilgrims were bringing dead cats to bury, the embalmers had to be ready. The workshops, the linen, the resin, the burial niches. It's an entire industry running alongside the wine trade.
Hilbert: Farouk said the modern tell was full of cat bones. Every time they plowed a field, they'd turn up little linen bundles. The farmers would toss them aside. He said it was bad luck to keep them, so they just left them in piles at the edge of the field.
The goddess's city, still giving up its dead cats two and a half thousand years later.
Hilbert: He said the cats were wrapped in the same pattern every time. Legs straight, tail down, ears flat. Like they were sleeping. The embalmers had a system.
They did. The cat mummies from Bubastis are consistent. The wrappings, the positioning, the little painted faces. It was a production line, but a careful one.
A production line for sleeping cats and a river full of drunk pilgrims. That's the city in two images.
Hilbert: Farouk would have liked that. He used to say Bubastis was a city that ran on cats and wine. He said the modern town was the same, just smaller.
The modern town being Zagazig, which is now a major city in its own right. The tell is basically a suburb.
Hilbert: I drove past it every morning. Six months. Never once stopped to look at the ruins. Farouk offered to take me once, but I was always in a hurry. Now I think about it and I wonder what I missed.
You missed the depressions in the fields where the canals used to be.
Hilbert: I saw those. You couldn't miss them. Big green lines running through the crops. The farmers planted right up to the edges. But the shape was there, like you said. A hundred feet wide, some of them. You could see where the water used to sit.
That's the Isheru. The sacred canal. The goddess's barque was rowed on that exact line. And now it's a green stripe in a field of wheat.
Hilbert: Farouk said the fields were always greener along the old canals. The soil was different. He didn't know why. He just knew you planted the good stuff there.
The goddess's footprint, fertilizing the Delta.
Hilbert: He would have said amen to that. Farouk was a religious man, in his way. He kept a little shrine in the warehouse. A picture of a saint, a candle, sometimes a bowl of milk. He said the milk was for the cats.
The cats. Always the cats.
Hilbert: There were always cats in the warehouse. Farouk fed them. He said they kept the rats out of the papyrus. And he said they were the descendants of the temple cats. Every cat in Zagazig was, according to Farouk. He said you could see it in their eyes.
The line from Bastet to a warehouse cat in nineteen eighty-four. That's a straight line, if you squint.
Hilbert: Farouk squinted a lot.
The cutting-room floor detail I wanted to bring up before we close. The festival calendar at UCL, the Digital Egypt project, lists the festival of Bast on day four of the month Parenenutet, roughly March, with the appearance of Bast in her boat on day five. That's attested on a statue from the twenty-sixth dynasty, now in the Louvre. So the barque procession wasn't just a vague climax. It had a specific day. Day five. The whole festival built to that one morning.
There's a separate sailing of Bast recorded in December, from an inscription of Thutmose the third at Karnak. So the goddess got at least two boat processions a year. The March one was the big one, but she also sailed in December.
The calendar drift complicates it, because the Egyptian year was three hundred sixty-five days with no leap day, so it slid against the solar year. A March festival would gradually move through the seasons over the centuries. But the ritual day, day four and day five of the month, stayed fixed. The priests kept the count even as the seasons shifted.
You could have a festival of Bast in what was effectively winter, or summer, depending on the century. And yet the boats still came, the wine still flowed, the women still jeered at the towns.
The ritual was the calendar. The weather was secondary.
One open question I keep turning over. We've been talking about this as a release valve, a scheduled inversion that keeps the social order stable. But what if it's the opposite? What if the festival is the real thing, and the rest of the year is the compromise? The Egyptians built a theology that says the goddess wants you drunk and dancing and free. Maybe the ordinary rules are the temporary state, and this week is the truth of who they were.
That's a unsettling way to look at it. The everyday order as the mask, and the festival as the face.
It would explain why the state tolerated it. Not because it was a safety valve, but because it was a debt. The order of the rest of the year was borrowed from the goddess, and once a year, you paid it back in wine and noise.
I don't know if the priests would have put it that way. But I think a lot of the people on those boats would have recognized it.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the binder clip inventory.
This has been My Weird Prompts, the human-AI collaboration podcast.
If you want to send us your own festival, or anything else, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
