Khonsu

Khonsu is the Egyptian moon god, son of Amun and Mut, who completes the Theban Triad worshipped at Karnak. His name means 'the traveler', for his nightly crossing of the sky, and he was revered as a measurer of time and as a healer who drove out evil spirits.

Khonsu did not begin as a gentle god. In the Pyramid Texts, in the spell known as the Cannibal Hymn, he is a fierce helper of the dead king who slaughters other gods and takes out their entrails so that the king can absorb their power. In the New Kingdom, at Thebes, he became the youthful son of Amun and Mut, often shown as a mummiform child with the sidelock of youth, holding the crook and flail and wearing a menat necklace and the lunar disk cradled in a crescent; sometimes he has a falcon's head. With Thoth, the other great moon god, he measured time by the phases of the moon, and he absorbed the older moon god Iah.

His temple at Karnak was begun under Ramesses III, and his fame as a healer grew in later centuries, when some of his forms were credited with defeating demons. The Bentresh Stela, now in the Louvre, tells the most celebrated story: the prince of a distant land called Bakhtan asks Ramesses II for help because his daughter Bentresh, the queen's sister, is possessed. The statue of Khonsu travels for seventeen months, drives the spirit out at once and stays more than three years, until the prince dreams of the god flying back to Egypt as a golden falcon. The tale is set under Ramesses II, but the stela was carved centuries later, after the Persian conquest, to glorify the god's temple.

At Kom Ombo, in the far south, he was worshipped as the son of Sobek and Hathor. Close to ordinary people through his healing power, he remained a god mortals could approach with their most urgent prayers.