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Sekhmet and the Secret of the Cats

In April of this year, I had the chance to exhibit my drawings at the famous Atlantis Bookshop, an occult institution in London that has existed for over 100 years and where such greats as Tolkien, Crowley and Gardner came and went.

The Atlantis Bookshop is situated on Museum Street, very close to the British Museum, itself worth seeing for its architecture alone.

On the ground floor to the left is the Egyptian section.
There stands a statue of the mysterious ancient Egyptian lion deity Sekhmet (Sachmet, Sechmet), which immediately cast its spell upon me.

Sekhmet, Tochter des Re - Zeichnung

Sekhmet, Tochter des Re
Original, Bleistift-Tusche-Zeichnung, 18 x 25,5 cm, 5/2023

Sekhmet literally means: the powerful one.
She symbolises the aggressive aspect of the sun and is considered the goddess of war and pestilence.
Her epithet was ‘Mistress of Trembling’, and she raged like a conflagration against the enemies of Egypt, who were also considered the enemies of Re.

Larger than life, in the form of a woman with the head of a lion and entirely of black onyx, she sits majestically enthroned upon a block of stone and gazes out over the visitors’ heads.
She wears a sun disc behind her head, for she is the daughter of the sun god Re (Ra).
Additional statues of Sekhmet stand to her left, but none fascinated me as much as the first, which immediately inspired me to create two drawings.

Yet not only did she fight against external, visible enemies but also against internal, invisible enemies such as demons and other evil forces.
She was therefore also a goddess of magic and the magical aspect of medical healing.

In one hand she carries an ankh, a cross with a handle, as a symbol of eternal life or the afterlife.
Her power is almost limitless. This is why she is feared, and no one wants her as an enemy.

There is a revealing tale: One day, Re sent Sekhmet to earth to destroy the evil people. She, however, was seized by bloodlust and continued killing indiscriminately. No one could stop her until Thoth, the god of wisdom, ultimately got the idea to make her drunk, which also succeeded. He had beer dyed red so that it would look like blood and entice the raging goddess to drink.
Later, as she was sleeping off her drunkenness, Re transformed her into the gentle cat deity Bastet, who became a goddess of compassion, mercy, fertility and love.
In her honour, the Egyptians celebrated a festival of drunkenness every year.

All those of us who love cats know these two sides of their nature, the aggressive one and the gentle, loving one, and we’re fascinated by the polarity.

Die Katzenseele - Bleistiftzeichnung

The Cat Soul or There is Only One Sekhmet
Original, pencil-ink drawing, 21 x 29.7 cm, 6/2023

Every cat, no matter how sweet and charming, harbours a Sekhmet within itself, and the interplay of these two parts of its nature constitutes its mystery and magic.

We once took in a cat, and without knowing the exact meaning of the name, we called her Sekhmet.

I don’t know if her behaviour would have been different if we had named her Bastet.
In any case, Sekhmet loved to suddenly ambush people, clutching the legs of the unsuspecting passer-by and biting down hard.
She was so aggressive that I had to wear thick jeans for half a year to shield my legs from her attacks.
At some point, the ‘crabbykin’, as a friend of mine laughingly called her, luckily realised that we were not her enemies, and the attacks stopped.
And we could laugh about our careless – or intuitive – naming.

Here’s to Sekhmet and the mystery of cats!


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