Khonsu

Khonsu was the child of the greatest temple city in Egypt. At Thebes, in the sprawling sacred complex of Karnak, the Egyptians worshipped a divine family: Amun, the hidden one, king of the gods; Mut, his consort, the vulture mother; and between them their son Khonsu, the moon. His name meant the Traveller, and it described his office exactly, for the moon is the great wanderer of the night sky, crossing the darkness from horizon to horizon and never standing still. He was shown as a mummified youth wrapped in linen like the dead, but wearing the sidelock of childhood on his shaved head to show he was a divine son, and bearing the disk and crescent of the moon above his brow. In his hands he held the crook and flail of kingship and the was sceptre of power, and sometimes he wore the head of a falcon, the sky-bird, ringed with the lunar disk. His temple still stands inside the Karnak enclosure, raised in its present form by Ramesses III, the warrior pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty.

The moon god was not always so gentle. In the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious writings in the world, carved in the burial chamber of King Unas around 2345 BCE, Khonsu appears in a terrifying light. In the passage called the Cannibal Hymn, the dead king rises as a great power and devours the gods themselves to take their strength, and it is Khonsu who does the butchery: Khonsu the slayer of the lords, who cuts their throats for the king and tears out what is in their bodies. This was the moon in its oldest Egyptian face, a knife in the dark, a god of the night's cruelties. Over the centuries the slaughterer faded and the kindly healer rose in his place, but the Egyptians never quite forgot that the wandering light of the night had teeth.

Khonsu's most famous misadventure was a game of senet, the board game of thirty squares that every Egyptian played. The sky goddess Nut was forbidden by Ra, the sun god who ruled creation, from giving birth on any day of the year, for her coming children threatened his throne. Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom, writing, and magic, took pity on her and challenged Khonsu to a game, wagering moonlight against the god of the moon. Game by game, Thoth won, until he had taken from Khonsu a seventy-second part of all his light. With that light Thoth fashioned five new days, days that belonged to no month and no year, and on those days Nut gave birth to her five children: Osiris, Horus the Elder, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys, the gods at the heart of every Egyptian story. That, the Egyptians said, is why the moon shrinks each month: Khonsu is still paying his debt, fading to darkness before his light returns.

The greatest legend of Khonsu is the tale of the Princess of Bekhten, a story the priests of Karnak carved on a black stone stela in the Ptolemaic age, though it is set in the days of Ramesses II, the great pharaoh. The ruler of Bekhten, a far-off land beyond the horizon, had a daughter named Bentresh who was seized by a demon, and no physician in the world could free her. In desperation the prince sent to Egypt, begging for the god of Karnak, and Ramesses consulted Khonsu in his shrine. The god nodded his consent, and his statue, called Khonsu Who Carries Out Plans, was placed in a golden barque and sent on the long road east, travelling for seventeen months with a guard of soldiers and horses. When the statue was carried before the princess, the demon knew its master: it cried out in welcome, begged the god's pardon, and fled from the girl forever. The prince of Bekhten was so grateful that he plotted to keep the god in his country, and detained the statue for over three years, until one night he dreamed of a golden falcon beating its way out of the shrine and flying back to Egypt. Terrified, he loaded the god with gifts and sent him home, and the stela says the statue returned to Karnak laden with treasure, having healed a princess a world away.

Khonsu's quieter work never stopped. His waxing and waning face was the calendar of Egypt, the clock by which festivals were fixed and the moon's months were counted, and his light was believed to heal: the sick prayed to him, for the demon he drove from Bentresh stood for every sickness and every evil that haunted the night. Amulets of the moon god guarded Egyptians after dark, when the dead and the demons walked. His cult endured into the Roman age, and his temple at Karnak still stands with its columns and gateways, one of the best preserved in Egypt. Every crescent moon that rises over Luxor is still the Traveller, still wandering, still keeping his ancient watch over the night.