The Julian Vayne My Magical Thing series of video interviews features people who can be considered to be occult practitioners of some kind talking briefly about an item they possess that has an interesting story. I realised I had an opportunity to air a wild and wacky tale involving a figurine of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. I contacted Julian and was pleased that he was happy to feature me.
Readers of my Atargatis would know that I embarked on a psychic questing adventure along the River Thames in 1991 but mention that some details were excluded, primarily for reasons of space and pace in relation to the wider story. This little tale dates from the beginnings of that saga. It was featured in my very first Glastonbury lecture, The Goddess and the River Thames, almost 25 years ago in July 1995. I did repeat the lecture a few times and it was taped by the Isle of Avalon Foundation in the mid-nineties but, since then, the Bast story has not featured in any of my books, or podcast interviews. Some of it was briefly mentioned in my YouTube lecture When Magic and Fiction Meet. This is the fullest version currently available. It’s a great example of the extent to which extreme strangeness became part of my everyday life then.
