There is something extremely old-web about building an entire corner of your site around one Egyptian cat goddess and then attaching an IRC channel to it.
Per-Bast describes itself as an online shrine to Bast, the ancient Egyptian goddess commonly associated with cats. The author explains the name Per-Bast as the Egyptian city later known to the Greeks as Bubastis and uses the page to collect history, religious interpretation, links and personal devotional practice.
The important distinction is that this is not presented as a neutral academic encyclopedia.
The author openly identifies personal beliefs, recommends prayer and offerings, and separates those beliefs from material described as based on historical records. That makes the page easier to read honestly: it is a believer’s shrine with historical material, not an institution pretending to have no point of view.
A shrine that is also a website
The surrounding site architecture is half the fun.
The navigation includes places called The Portal, UFO, Town of ZZT, The Observatory, Library of Babel, Haunted House, Reptile House, KoshkaIRC, Wildcat Den and The Dock. At the bottom sit tiny buttons for things including “Best viewed on a real computer,” Autism Acceptance, Pale Moon, and XHTML/CSS validation.
Visitors are invited to leave comments in a guestbook or stop by the site’s IRC network.
That is a radically different social model from the modern web. The page is public, but community happens through deliberately chosen side channels rather than a universal comment widget owned by a platform.
The Bast page itself discusses the deity’s protective roles, cat imagery, the ancient city of Per-Bast, Herodotus’s account of festivals there, modern Kemetic practice, and the author’s own offering habits. Historical or religious claims on a devotional page should obviously be checked against specialist sources before being treated as settled scholarship.
But as a web artifact, the page is wonderfully clear about what it is.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps turning up sites like this because the independent web gave narrow obsessions room to become complete environments.
Per-Bast is not a post about Bast.
It is a place about Bast.
The distinction is the whole point.