December 27, 2009
Bast guards the Two Lands
A major part of the process of settling and growing in Kemetic religion is figuring out one’s calendar. With some hundreds of known festivals filling almost every day of the year, it can be entirely overwhelming! Most people seem to prune it down to a handful of focused observances, with at best a quick candle lighting or a moment of prayer to acknowledge some of the other days.
The festival known as Bast Guards the Two Lands (sometimes called Bast Guides the Two Lands) is one of my big ones, and this year it was even more of a production than usual, with the Northeast gathering on one weekend, my own personal observance on the following Friday, and the Ten Days of Joy meditations spanning both. It included fellowship, singing, the decoration and shaking of sistra, the lighting of candles, offerings of chocolate and flowers and cookies and oranges and roast duck (among other things), long bouts of contemplation, a renewed sense of purity and the beginnings of a shift in spiritual focus, and through it all, the overpowering warmth and presence of my Mother’s love.
Six years ago, I celebrated this festival for the very first time, although I didn’t realize it then. It was a time of deep reflection, as it still is today, a time of sitting in darkness and opening to the light, a time of stillness and profound listening. And yet it’s also a festival of song and rejoicing, of group celebration and festivity, of laughter. It was interesting to me that the Ten Days of Joy also seemed to swing between stillness and exuberance, inward and outward, contemplation and action. Perhaps one could say that joy and love both reconcile all opposites.
Praise to You, Bast, pre-eminent in the field of the god! Mistress of Heaven, O Peerless One, Firstborn of Tem! May You guide us, may You guard us, in every day and every hour, as You guide and guard the Two Lands! Nekhtet!
(The picture above is from after the group celebration, when everyone else had left and our burned-down celebrant candles were removed from the bowl of sand, leaving just Bast’s central candle in place.)