White Magic Studio

seriouslysistrum:

 The most frequently represented illustration from Mesopotamia is the

decorated panel of the Great Lyre from Ur in the University of

Pennsylvania Museum, dating to the middle of the 3rd

millennium bc, with animals playing musical instruments,

including a jackal playing the Y-shaped sistrum.  In

Mesopotamia Y-shaped sistra seem to have been very common

over a long period, and we hear of them being used in their

hundreds as part of religious festivals, 

There is only a handful of iconographic

representations of the Mesopotamian sistra: interestingly, the

sistrum is always accompanied by another flat, unidentified

percussion instrument resting on the knees of the player and in

two of those scenes the sistra are associated with the kalū, or

performers of prayers. As in Egypt, the sistra seem to have been

shaken to pacify or please a goddess, here the battle goddess

Inana. Though it is often stated that sistra originated in Egypt

the Mesopotamian examples would appear to be equally as

early. The surviving sistra from Mesopotamia, very few in

number, dating mainly to the Late Bronze Age 

.

In the classical world the sistrum is always associated with

Isis, though in Egypt it is linked strongly also with other deities,

– prinicipally Hathor, Bes, and the cat-headed goddess Bastet.

In Egypt (and under the influence of Egyptian religion, in

Rome, too) cats and the cat-goddess Bastet are often linked

with sistra. As an example, a bronze figure in the British

Museum of Bastet, the Egyptian cat-headed goddess, holds a

sistrum decorated with a Hathor head. Bastet was

sometimes known as the ‘Mistress of the Sistrum’, although

this title more properly belonged to Hathor, whose identity

widely overlapped with that of Isis. Bastet and Sekhmet were

dual forms of the daughter of the sun-god Ra, the one friendly,

the other fierce, defender of her father and the pharaoh. In the

Egyptian depictions Bastet also sometimes carried a lion’s head

or wore it on her aegis to warn of her potential ferocity: in our

example she holds the aegis to her chest. This reflects the

increasing association of the other goddesses with Sekhmet,

particularly from about 500 bc, who could threaten to destroy

mankind or be pacified and benevolent (the Myth of the Eye of

Ra). In sacred cat cemeteries Bastet takes the appeased form of

a cat or cat-headed woman. When the Greeks occupied Egypt

they changed her name to Ailuros, Greek for cat, identifying

her as a version of the moon-goddess Artemis. There is just

conceivably a possibility that the half-moon shape of the sistra

arms is an acknowledgment of this. The goddess Isis, typically

also associated with the sistrum is of course often depicted

with cow horns as a head-dress or pendant, but these turned

outward at the ends; it is only when her worship arrived in the

classical world that the horns took on the crescent form.

Interestingly in later Roman cult, Io, legendarily the lover of

Zeus, was transformed by him into a heifer to protect her from

the anger of his wife Hera, and is shown as a woman with small

cow horns. She becomes identified with the goddess Isis, a rôle

famous from the wall-painting from the Temple of Isis at

Pompeii where Io is welcomed by Isis at Canopus. The cow

horns of Isis derived from the Egyptian assimilation of her rôles

with those of Hathor, who was often depicted in this way.

Tiny figures of cats and kittens often decorate sistra from

Egypt and Rome: Plutarch, in his discussion of sistra, explained

the presence of the cat on the arch of enclosed sistra as an

emblem of the moon. He offers illuminating remarks on this:48

At the top of the circumference of the sistrum they construct the

figure of a cat with a human face … by the cat they symbolize the

moon because of the varied colouring, nocturnal activity, and

fecundity of the animal. For the cat is said to bring forth first one,

then two and three and four and five, thus increasing the number

by one until she reaches seven, so that she brings forth in all 28, the

number also of the moon’s illuminations. Perhaps, however, this

may seem somewhat mythical. But the pupils in the eye of the cat

appear to grow large and round at the time of the full moon, and to

become thin and narrow at the time of the wanings of that

heavenly body. By the human features of the cat is indicated the

intelligence and the reason that guides the changes of the moon.

Because cats were considered good, protective mothers,

figures of the sistrum-bearing Bastet accompanied by kittens

were often dedicated by women (and sometimes men), the

number of kittens echoing the number of children that they

desired. Similarly, fertility rituals performed by women in

Egypt and associated with the goddess Isis often involved

sistra. Though we cannot be sure of details, we may perhaps

reasonably infer that our ivory sistra were somehow involved

with the worship of a female deity by priestesses or female

votaries. In Egypt, however, kings were also shown using

sistra, and it appears to have been a male priest who taught

priestesses the art of sistrum-shaking in Middle Kingdom

It might be worth noting one further reference to the use of

the sistrum, which Plutarch says was also used to avert storm

winds or volcanic activity, in their manifestation as Typhon:

The sistrum also makes it clear that all things in existence need to

be shaken, or rattled about, and never to cease from motion but, as

it were, to be waked up and agitated when they grow drowsy and

torpid. They say that they avert and repel Typhon by means of the

sistrums, indicating thereby that when destruction constricts and

checks Nature, generation releases and arouses it by means of

motion. This seems to have been a specifically Roman usage, though it

could hark back to the Etruscans, given their interest in

meteorological phenomena as omens, and that Typhon was

commonly represented in Etruscan art. As well as in the

worship of Isis, it may be an additional reason for the frequency

of findings at Pompeii, with its proximity to volcanic activity.