Grit with Gods: Bastet, the Lioness Warrior
by Randy Kaufman, with research assistance from Dustin Lowman
“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.”
Cats’ godly comportment was sufficient to earn the worship of the Ancient Egyptians, who “came to admire felines for their complex, dual nature,” according to Yekaterina Barbash, curator for the Brooklyn Museum and Ph.D. in ancient Egyptian history, Art, and Philology. The Egyptians appreciated cats’ capacity for both grace and aggression, gentle care and fatal danger, seeing in them the mark of the supernatural.
Of all the feline deities, none attained higher rank than Bastet, goddess of many interlinked domains: warfare and protection, fertility and children, music, the arts, and, of course, perfume.
You might wonder why a goddess of fertility and children is important to me, a woman who always wanted dogs, never wanted children, and never relented, in spite of the protestations of strangers, friends, and family alike.
As a financial advisor, I am prone to assuming a custodial, nurturing role with my clients, in order to help them find peace. Sometimes, that means facing conflict head-on; other times, it means listening deeply, with a heaping dose of empathy on the side, in order to nurture intergenerational dreams.
War & Peace
In my professional life, I often work with people who believe money matters most. They go to great lengths to pursue the false god of numerical bliss, working insane hours, engineering elaborate tax strategies, sacrificing contentment and connection in the process.
After decades of working with wealthy families, I know that money matters of course; however, it doesn’t matter most. Peace of mind does. Money is an important part of peace of mind, but it’s only a part; family harmony, quality of life, purpose, and abandoning the relentless pursuit of more are some of the other parts.
It’s understandable that people who get a taste of wealth often think it’s a panacea. Money is a wonderful thing to have — and an even more wonderful thing to give away — but unless you use it properly, it has no necessary link to happiness, and certainly no link to good, or evil.
Helping people come around to this point of view can require some level of confrontation. It requires the courage to engage in difficult conversations, crossing into intimate territory. But it’s not really warfare, or if it is, it’s warfare in the name of protection. My job is to protect families’ happiness and peace of mind. Catalyzing this fundamental paradigm-shift is my primary method of protection.
“Money is an inanimate object. It can do good works or bad works depending on the hands that wield it, and the hearts governing those hands.”
Fertility & Children
Again, it might sound strange to identify with the goddess of fertility and children when I never wanted to be a mother. There are, however, many ways to act maternally. Like other women who have chosen this path, I was criticized over the years for wanting to have dogs, yes, and children, not at all. But I knew what I wanted, and I wasn’t going to let some baseless, irrational social expectation stand in my way. (After decades, I realized that this experience was not unique to me when I read a recently published New York Times article about other women who felt the same.)
But periodically, clients and boyfriends alike would praise me for my maternal instinct. At first, I found it confusing, but I came to realize that just because I didn’t want to have kids, it didn’t mean I was uninvested in our species’ future. It matters to me that children grow up knowing the value and the power of money — especially wealthy children, who have every reason not to. It matters to me that families have well-defined values, grounded in trust and respect.
I’ve also always loved mentorship, shepherding young people through the early stages of their careers, often learning more from them than they ever learn from me. Both mentorship and working with families are custodial acts: I’m concerned with the wellbeing of younger generations, and I invest my time and energy in their development.
Music, the Arts, & Perfume
Now, we get to the part of Bastet that may make the most sense, the aesthetic side. As I learned from my always graceful mother, there is a transcendent power in visual elegance. At its most basic, it means showing up well for the world, demonstrating that you care about earning other people’s respect, and putting your best self out there, each and every day.
But it’s deeper, too. When we focus on the quantitative aspects of life, we obscure the qualitative aspects, which ultimately mean much more to human happiness. Music and the arts have always been central to my life. Indeed, my life has been largely defined by the music I was listening to at the time, and the books that shaped my perspective along the way.
Art is where people endeavor to express the experiences and ideas that mean the most to them. It’s where people wrestle with unanswerable questions and inexpressible affection for life. Art, in short, is the domain of meaning, without which our lives are so empty.
Not to mention that I always, always, always wear some kind of perfume. Usually it’s some variety of Chanel, but I deviate on rare occasions to Jimmy Chou or Tom Ford. To me, perfume (and lipstick) are essentials — even in a global pandemic. Like everyone, I had some pretty disheveled days during the past year, but even at my messiest, a little cherished perfume never hurt.
Bastet Hound
Bastet exemplifies a range of traits that I’ve always tried to embody. She’s a fighter and a protector, a life-giver and an art-lover, and she always shows up smelling good. I may be more of a dog person than a cat person, but Bastet is one cat I think I could get along with.