Which Egyptian god has a cat head?
41183297#2
Cats in ancient Egypt were valued very highly and were seen to be very close to the gods. They believed the cats were an embodiment of the goddess Bastet. Harming a cat in ancient Egypt was an offense punishable by death. When a cat died the Egyptians would mummify and bury their cats as an offering to the gods.
Dried cat
1846593#0
Cats in ancient Egypt were represented in social and religious practices of Ancient Egypt for more than 30 centuries. Several Ancient Egyptian deities were depicted and sculptured with cat-like heads such as Mafdet, Bastet and Sekhmet, representing justice, fertility and power.
The deity Mut was also depicted as a cat and in the company of a cat.
Cats in ancient Egypt
32024895#1
Funerary cults are especially associated with ancient Egypt, where it was common for royalty, those associated with royalty, cats, and the wealthy to be mummified. This practice was done so as to preserve their bodies for the journey to the afterlife. The deity Osiris, who was the dying and reviving god and Lord of the Egyptian afterlife, was usually depicted as a mummy in Egyptian art. Also at Bubastis, where Bast was worshiped, there was a massive cat cemetery. Cats were also thought to journey to the afterlife, usually to join their owners. These needed their own material goods for this journey, such as food.
Funerary cult
386875#5
Egyptian Maus are typically slender and muscular and they are thought to be one of the progenitor breeds of the modern domestic cat. They have anatomical, metabolic, and behavioural differences from other cat breeds which could be considered evidence of antiquity or at least uniqueness from other cat breeds. Some anatomical differences are their legs, which are slightly shorter in the front than in the back. They also have a skin fold under the belly, resembling that of the cheetah, which assists in running by allowing the legs to stretch back farther. Also one of the most important recognizable "traits" of this particular animal is a long, dark, dorsal stripe that runs from its head to its tail along its spine.
Egyptian Mau
13158540#33
In "The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat" (1886, 32 x 49"), a priestess kneels before an altar upon which is placed the mummy of a cat. She is burning incense, and has presented offerings of flowers and food to the cat's spirit, together with a plate of milk. On the wall behind the priestess is an Egyptian fresco, and a statue of the goddess Sekhmet or Bastet enthroned guards the entrance to the temple. Stairs lead up to the doorway, through which a view of the sky and other buildings are visible.
John Reinhard Weguelin
20748946#4
Ancient Egyptian religion was characterized by polytheism, the belief in multiple gods. Prior to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, there were a tremendous number of these gods, each representative of a different element of the natural world. After the great unification, a more limited list of gods developed. These gods were usually depicted as having a human body and an animal head, further emphasizing the importance of animals in Egyptian religion. Over time, religious cults emerged for the worship of each specific god. Two main types of worship distinguished the cults—the first choosing to worship the god through mass mummified animal offerings and the second selecting a totem animal to represent the god, which was mummified at the time of its death.
Animal mummy
10331#35
At many sacred sites, the Egyptians worshipped individual animals which they believed to be manifestations of particular deities. These animals were selected based on specific sacred markings which were believed to indicate their fitness for the role. Some of these cult animals retained their positions for the rest of their lives, as with the Apis bull worshipped in Memphis as a manifestation of Ptah. Other animals were selected for much shorter periods. These cults grew more popular in later times, and many temples began raising stocks of such animals from which to choose a new divine manifestation. A separate practice developed in the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, when people began mummifying any member of a particular animal species as an offering to the god whom the species represented. Millions of mummified cats, birds, and other creatures were buried at temples honoring Egyptian deities. Worshippers paid the priests of a particular deity to obtain and mummify an animal associated with that deity, and the mummy was placed in a cemetery near the god's cult center.
Ancient Egyptian religion
9500294#45
Most deities were depicted in several ways. Hathor could be a cow, cobra, lioness, or a woman with bovine horns or ears. By depicting a given god in different ways, the Egyptians expressed different aspects of its essential nature. The gods are depicted in a finite number of these symbolic forms, so they can often be distinguished from one another by their iconographies. These forms include men and women (anthropomorphism), animals (zoomorphism), and, more rarely, inanimate objects. Combinations of forms, such as deities with human bodies and animal heads, are common. New forms and increasingly complex combinations arose in the course of history, with the most surreal forms often found among the demons of the underworld. Some gods can only be distinguished from others if they are labeled in writing, as with Isis and Hathor. Because of the close connection between these goddesses, they could both wear the cow-horn headdress that was originally Hathor's alone.
Certain features of divine images are more useful than others in determining a god's identity. The head of a given divine image is particularly significant. In a hybrid image, the head represents the original form of the being depicted, so that, as the Egyptologist Henry Fischer put it, "a lion-headed goddess is a lion-goddess in human form, while a royal sphinx, conversely, is a man who has assumed the form of a lion." Divine headdresses, which range from the same types of crowns used by human kings to large hieroglyphs worn on gods' heads, are another important indicator. In contrast, the objects held in gods' hands tend to be generic. Male deities hold "was" staffs, goddesses hold stalks of papyrus, and both sexes carry "ankh" signs, representing the Egyptian word for "life", to symbolize their life-giving power.
Ancient Egyptian deities
680#26
The Egyptian god Set is usually depicted with the head of an unidentified animal, whose similarity to an aardvark has been noted in scholarship.
Aardvark
48001551#14
Cats have historically been associated with magic, and have been revered by various human cultures, the ancient Egyptians worshipping them as gods and the creatures being feared as demons in ancient Japan, such as the "bakeneko". 
Vogue magazine has suggested that the popularity of cats on the internet is culturally-specific, being popular in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Other nations favor different animals online, Ugandans sharing images of goats and chickens, Mexicans preferring llamas, and Chinese internet users sharing images of the river crab and grass-mud horse due to double-meanings of their names allowing them to "subvert government Internet censors". While cats on the internet might be culturally-specific, cat content is increasing in its popularity in various cultures as a scientific study showed by looking at German, English, Italian, and Russian media.
Cats and the Internet