Zoology, the trivial name of the buffalo, a species of the bov. See Bos.

Bubastis, in the Egyptian Mythology, one of the names of Isis or the moon. The Egyptians bestowed different names on the sun, either to characterize his effects or his relations with respect to the earth; they followed the same method respecting the moon. Cherenon, a sacred writer of Egypt, leaves no doubt on this subject. "Every thing which is published of Osiris and Isis, all the sacred fables, allude only to the phases of the moon, and the course of the sun." Bubastis was one of the principal attributes of Isis. Theology having personified her, formed of her a divinity, in whose honour a city of that name was built, as described by Herodotus, and where the people collected from all parts of Egypt, at a certain period of the year. A cat was the symbol of this deity. The priests fed it with sacred food; and when it died, they embalmed its body, and carried it in pomp to the tomb prepared for it. The ancients have explained this worship variously. The Greeks pretend that when Typhon declared war against the gods, Apollo transformed himself into a vulture, Mercury into an ibis, and Bubastis into a cat, and that the veneration of the people for the latter animal took rise from that fable; but they ascribe their own ideas to the Egyptians, who thought very differently. However that may be, the cat was greatly honoured in Egypt, and a Roman soldier having imprudently killed one, was immediately put to death by the populace.

the language of the priests, was deemed the daughter of Isis, and even represented her in cer- It is for this reason that the Greeks, who honoured the moon by the name of Diana, bestowed it also on this Egyptian divinity. Bubastis, says Herodotus, is called Diana by the Greeks. The Egyptians attributed to her the virtue of afflicting pregnant women. The Greeks and Latins, disciples of the Egyptians, ascribed the same power to Diana; and Horace does not think it unworthy of his pen to address the following strophe to her:

Montium cujus nemorumque, Virgo, Que laborantes utero puellas Ter vocata audis, admirique leibo, Diva Triformis.

The philosopher will seek for the origin of this ancient worship in the laws imposed by nature on women, and which in some measure follow the lunar revolutions. The natural philosophers and the poets buried it under allegories unintelligible to the people.

A perfect resemblance, however, does not exist between the two deities we have been speaking of. The Greeks constituted Diana goddesses of the chase and of the forests; an attribute the Egyptians did not acknowledge in Bubastis. The former added, that she was the daughter of Jupiter and Latona, and Bubastis was produced by Osiris and Isis.

A barbarous custom was introduced at the festivals celebrated in honour of Bubastis, called by the Greeks also Iliithyia or Lucina, to mark her presiding over childbirth. The Egyptians adored her under this name in the city of Iliithyia, situated near Latopolis.

It remains to resolve a question which naturally arises here: How could Bubastis be called the daughter of Isis, since she also was a symbol of the moon? The Egyptian theology easily explains these apparent contradictions. Isis was the general appellation of the moon, Bubastis a particular attribute. The sun, in conjunction with the star of the night, formed the celestial marriage of Osiris and Isis; the crescent which appears three days after was allegorically called their daughter. It is in this sense that the Hebrews called this same phenomenon, the birth of the moon, and that Horace says,

Caelo supinas si tuleris manus, Nascente luna ruflicia Phidyle, &c. &c.

These observations inform us, why in the city of Iliithyia, where Bubastis was adored, the third day of the lunar month was consecrated by a particular worship. In fact, it is three days after the conjunction that the moon, disengaged from the rays of the sun, appears as a crescent, and is visible to us. The Egyptians celebrated therefore a solemnity in honour of Bubastis, which in their tongue signified new moon. The crescent with which her head was crowned, expresses palpably the intention of the priests in creating this symbolical divinity.