Khonsu ḫnsw

Start with the version everybody knows.

Khonsu is a boy. He stands wrapped like a mummy, arms free, holding a crook and a flail, with the side-lock of childhood hanging at his temple and a full moon resting in a crescent on his head. He is the son of Amun and Mut, the third of Thebes, and his surname is Nefer-hetep — beautiful in peace. People prayed to him to be cured of things.

Now the other version.

Unas 510

The Pyramid Text of King Unas contains a passage that people who study Egyptian religion tend to describe carefully, because it is about a dead king who hunts, kills and eats the gods in order to absorb their powers. It is not a metaphor, or if it is, nothing in the text says so.

There is a staff. Somebody snares the gods. Somebody inspects them for condition. Somebody binds them. Then a god steps forward and, in Budge's translation, cuts their throats and draws out their intestines for the king.

That god is called Khensu. He is also described as "the messenger whom he sent out to meet them."

Budge does not hedge about who this is. Khensu the slaughterer and the messenger can be no other than Khensu the Moon-god of later times.

Two thousand years separate the butcher from the boy with the moon on his head. Egypt kept both, and never appears to have thought there was a problem.

The name is a verb

Here is what holds the two together, and it is not sentiment.

The name comes from khens: to travel, to move about, to run.

That is the moon. It is the thing in the sky that visibly goes somewhere — the sun takes the same path every day, but the moon shifts, arrives late, changes shape, crosses. If you are naming the moon after what it does, you name it the traveller.

And a traveller is what you send. The oldest role attested for him is messenger — the one dispatched to go and fetch. The killing follows from the errand, not from any quality of moon-ness. He was the one who went, so he was the one sent, and what he was sent to do that night was terrible.

The same word is used in the same text for what Thoth does: Unas travelleth through heaven like Thoth. Thoth is the other moon god. They were always going to collide, and eventually they did — at Hermopolis, Thoth's own city, Khonsu ends up worshipped as Khensu-Tehuti, the twice great, lord of Khemennu. The Theban son took over the local god's job in the local god's home town.

What Thebes was doing

Amun had a problem, and it was recency.

He rose because Thebes rose, and Thebes rose late. By the time Amun was the great god of Egypt, Heliopolis had been claiming primacy for well over a thousand years on the strength of having the oldest theology in the country. You cannot argue with that. You can only acquire some.

So the Theban priesthood gave Amun a family. For a consort they took Mut, whose oldest identifiable layer is the female counterpart of the primeval water itself. For a son they took Khonsu, a moon god whose name, Budge says, "is older than the dynastic period."

Budge's word for the manoeuvre is astuteness, and it is the right one. Amun sits at the centre of a family older than he is, and the antiquity transfers. The father is the newcomer; the wife and the child are ancient. Nobody had to say so.

Three temples for one god

There is a detail about his precinct at Thebes that I keep returning to.

The great temple of Khonsu seems to have held three shrines, and Budge lists them:

1. The Temple of Khonsu. 2. The Temple of Khonsu in Thebes, Nefer-hetep. 3. The Temple of Khonsu who works his plans in Thebes.

One god. Three buildings. Three names, inside one wall.

We would want to know whether that is three gods or one, and the honest answer is that the question is ours rather than theirs. An Egyptian priest could evidently hold "Khonsu" and "Khonsu Nefer-hetep" and "Khonsu who works his plans" as three addressable things without any sense of strain — the way you might write to a person at their home and at their office and expect a different reply.

The third one is the interesting one. Who works his plans. That is the aspect of him that gets things done — the one you approach when you need something changed rather than blessed.

On crocodiles

Among the images of him Budge lists is one I would like to see: the dual god Khonsu standing upon crocodiles.

Egyptian healing magic has a whole class of object where a young god stands on crocodiles and grips scorpions and snakes in his fists, mastering everything venomous at once. You poured water over the carved spells and drank it. Thousands survive; they are the closest thing the ancient world had to over-the-counter medicine.

That Khonsu appears in that posture fits the shape of him better than the peaceful name does. He is not the god who makes you feel better. He is the god who goes out and deals with the thing.

Which is, in the end, the same job description as Unas 510 — the one who is sent, and who comes back having done it. The moon crosses the sky whatever is out there. Somewhere under the boy with the crescent on his head there is still a figure holding a knife, and Egypt did not find that strange.