Egypt's 700,000-Pilgrim Party at Bubastis

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Sep 19, 2026 · 26m

Herodotus ranked the Festival of Bastet at Bubastis as the chiefest and most zealously celebrated of all Egyptian festivals — and claimed 700,000 pilgrims attended, men and women not counting children. The journey itself was the party: a Nile flotilla of music, rattles, flutes, wine, and ritual insults hurled at riverside towns along the way. This episode walks through the lead-up, the street scene, and the theology underneath it all — why a festival of sanctioned misrule wasn't chaos but ritual, and why the cat goddess's city was simultaneously Egypt's party capital and its largest feline…