The Moon-Traveller of Thebes and the Healing of a Princess

Khonsu, whose name is linked to the idea of the traveller who crosses the night sky, is the moon-god of Thebes and the divine child of the Theban triad, son of Amun and Mut. As the moon that waxes and wanes he measured the months, but he was best known as a healer and a driver-out of hostile spirits. A famous inscription, the so-called Bentresh Stela, tells, as though of the reign of Ramesses II, though it was carved much later, how a statue of Khonsu was sent to a foreign land to cure a possessed princess, casting out the spirit that afflicted her; the text shows the god's reputation for healing at a distance through his cult image. His great temple within the Karnak precinct is one of the best-preserved examples of a standard New Kingdom Egyptian temple plan. His temple within Karnak, largely the work of Ramesses III in the twentieth dynasty, built on the site of an earlier shrine, shows how finely Egyptian theology could subdivide a single god: its inscriptions distinguish Khonsu-in-Thebes-Neferhotep, the temple's chief resident form, from Khonsu the Child and Khonsu the Provider, treated in ritual texts almost as separate personalities capable of being invoked one to another. Such internal multiplication, a single deity split into named aspects each with its own epithet or shrine within one precinct, was a normal feature of mature Egyptian temple theology, a way of giving ritual access to different facets of the same power rather than a sign of confusion.