KHONSU - The God-Eater who Became a Defender | Egyptian Myth

Over 4,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians buried a secret in one of the first pyramids. A set of sacred texts meant only for the pharaoh himself was carved into the walls of the final resting place of Pharaoh Unas, the last pharaoh of the fifth dynasty in the 24th century BCE. Known as the Pyramid Texts, these incantations were the key to living an immortal life beyond They helped the pharaoh to release the soul from the body so that he would be ready to be received by the gods and live in eternity. But something dark is hidden in these texts. Here we find the first known reference to a god that seems to have come from nightmares. In the antechamber to Pharaoh Unas's eternal resting place, there is a section of hieroglyphics that stands out so much from the rest of the texts that it's come to be known as the Cannibal Hymn. In it, a terrifying god appears at the behest of the pharaoh and he slaughters and devours other gods to absorb their power. He shares this power with the pharaoh in the afterlife. In the entire chamber, this entity is only mentioned once in these lines. Indeed, it is Khonsu who slaughters the lords, cuts their throats for Unas, and takes out for him what is in their bellies. He is the messenger whom the king sends out to chastise. Khonsu, god of the moon, from the hieroglyphs meaning he who traverses the sky or simply the traveler, referring to the moon itself as it travels across the stars. Given his fearsome origin, it's surprising how Khonsu would eventually bear the names of Embracer, Provider, and Defender. Over the centuries, he becomes known as the god of not only the moon but of time, of fertility and healing, of fate and judgment, and as a fierce warrior who battles evil spirits in the name of good. Khonsu is usually depicted as a male with a headdress of a crescent moon holding up a full moon disk. He wears a sidelock of hair indicating his youth as the child of Amun and Mut. He also wears a special necklace and carries a crook and flail, symbols of power in ancient Egypt. He also sometimes is depicted with the head of a falcon, denoting his position as a sky god. Khonsu's grisly reputation continues for centuries after his first appearance in the Cannibal Hymn. His influence expanded far beyond just the pharaoh via a new set of magical spells. They were funerary texts meant for the layperson called the Coffin Texts, first appearing about 900 years after the hieroglyphics in the Pyramid of Unas. In them, Khonsu is again presented as Khonsu who lives on hearts, Khonsu the cannibal, or Khonsu the bloodthirsty one. But how did worship of this bloodthirsty moon god eventually change to that of a benevolent defender? How has the cannibal god become a healer, a god of fertility, fate, and judgment? And what can we take from this myth? It's important to remember that the history of ancient Egypt spans over 3,000 years. Naturally, along that timeline, things shift and change a lot. Centers of power move from city to city, gods rise and fall in importance based on changing circumstances and local beliefs, and even the nature and responsibilities of those gods can be different from place to place, from one period to another. Khonsu is an example of this. Early on, he's considered a bloodthirsty cannibal, bent on increasing his own power and the power of the pharaohs. But around the time of the New Kingdom, starting around 1550 BCE, Egypt entered its golden era of power, and Khonsu's image changed radically when he became a major deity at the seat of Egyptian power. In this period, the capital city moved back to Thebes, and three gods rose to the highest importance of that period. The so-called Theban Triad consisted of Amun, the main creator deity, Mut, the sky mother, and their child, Khonsu. As a member of this triad, Khonsu's influence would have been at its height. Famously, and most importantly, Khonsu holds dominion over the moon, again referring to his name, He Who Traverses the Sky. This movement across the sky is naturally associated with the passage of time, and so Khonsu is considered a god of time along with Thoth. However, Khonsu was often associated with the sun as well. This is a natural thought since the moon and the sun rise and fall to mark the daily cycle, so a god in charge of time would perhaps have a part to play in both. When he is shown with the head of a falcon, Khonsu's headdress is sometimes interpreted as a crescent moon and a sun disk rather than a moon disk. This association with the moon is a powerful one. Inherently, the moon marks time but also highlights the balance between light and darkness, as well as marking a monthly cycle of death and rebirth as it waxes and wanes. In myths from other ancient civilizations, namely Greek and Roman, but also some Central and South American civilizations, figures associated with a moon tend to be goddesses, and the moon itself is a feminine symbol. That isn't always the case though, and here in Khonsu we see a male lunar god. In fact, Khonsu's power is said to wax and wane opposite to the phases of the moon, which may reflect this masculine identity. Specifically, when the moon is full, he's at his weakest, but when it is new and a crescent will soon rise, his powers are at their peak, and he is known as the mighty bull, with a crescent moon being the bull's horns. So there's our masculine symbol. This is similar to the Mesopotamian lunar god Seme, who in addition to being the moon god, is guardian of cattle due to the bullhorn shape of the crescent moon. When the crescent moon rose, Khonsu was said to be able to help women to conceive, and his power over childbirth and the human body didn't end there. At his height, he was also a god of fertility and healing. If you needed evil or bad spirits driven away, including those of the ailing body, he was the god to pray to. In ancient Egypt, the common belief was that sickness was caused by demons or gods blocking important channels to the body. Practical remedies and medicines would first be administered by either priests or even dedicated doctors, then Khonsu would play his role on the magic side of things, using his old ferocity from his god-killing days to ward off any demon who might attack a person's health. A good god to have in your corner. His bloodthirsty side is never really forgotten, only changed into something positive. In addition to fighting demons that cause illness, Khonsu played the role of a god of fate, judgment, and punishment. In yet another of his forms, a baboon, a form that Thoth also took from time to time, Khonsu was keeper of the Books of the End of the Year. The Books of the End of the Year were written by the gods and contained the names of everyone who would die before that year was done. People would pray to Khonsu the Merciful and appeal to him to keep their names out of the books. As a god of fate, Khonsu, again in baboon form, would sometimes appear sitting atop the scales in the famous Weighing of the Heart ceremony. In the posthumous Weighing of the Heart, your soul would go to the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, and your heart would be placed on a scale, weighed down with the bad deeds of your life. This ceremony was the reason the heart was not removed from mummies. On the other end of the scale from the heart was placed a single feather, a feather of Ma'at. Ma'at is the Egyptian concept of order, harmony, and justice. If your heart tipped the scales, it would be devoured by a crocodile-headed goddess called Amit, and watching over this process, perched atop the scale, we sometimes see the baboon form of Khonsu. The connotation would have been clear to the ancient Egyptians. Khonsu, the fierce god of fate, is also here at the assisting and passing judgment on your soul. Khonsu was important enough in Thebes to have his own temple built at the temple complex of Karnak. Luckily for us, his temple is in relatively good shape considering how time has treated some of the others. At his temple, we see depictions of Khonsu with the pharaoh, pretty standard stuff. However, in the back of that temple, a set of hieroglyphics outlines a completely different cosmogony, or creation myth, than the more widely known Egyptian creation story. In it, Khonsu, fused together with Amun and Ta in the form of a great snake, carries a set of fertilized eggs in his throat to Thebes. He then gives birth to the Ogdoad, a four-male-female pair group of gods representing primordial forces like the While belief in this snake birth of eight primordial deities was primarily centered at a different city in Hermopolis, nowhere else in Egypt does this so-called Khonsu cosmogony specifically set Khonsu as a major player in the creation of the world. It's unclear whether it was a local belief, or perhaps even a belief held by the priests of Khonsu themselves. In any case, it shows how influential and powerful Khonsu was at his height. So, we have a transformation of Khonsu spanning a thousand years from cannibal god to healer and defender, and in at least one case, as co-creator of everything. His story shows that even the most fearsome gods can be repurposed and saved from darkness. It would have been perfectly logical for Khonsu to remain as some kind of fringe cannibal in the minds of the Egyptians, a negative force, a nightmare god. Yet, that isn't what happened. His selfish and destructive bloodthirst was left in his past, and he became a defender, called on specifically for his ferocity in order to fight evil. This is a great redemption story, and one we have seen many times, the anti-hero with a dark past who uses his powers for good. I don't want to minimize the importance or complexity of ancient Egyptian religion here, but instead relate this back to something we understand in modern times. There are lots of examples of villains from modern stories redeeming themselves in one way or another, but they often land in one of four categories. One, they redeem themselves in the end but die for all the evil they've done, for example Darth Vader or Snape. Two, they redeem themselves by turning away from their dark side entirely, like Scrooge. Three, they are only temporarily good, often switching back and forth, like Loki or Catwoman. Finally, the one that most resembles Khonsu, an evil character who becomes good and continues to use the skills and powers they gained as villains to do good. For example, Black Widow from the Marvel movies is an ex-Soviet spy and assassin who eventually defects and uses her skills for good, or the Punisher or Deadpool. Interesting that the examples that come to mind are all mercenaries with an ambiguous morality, but these are characters who did bad things and then had a change of mind. Their methods are the same, but their ideology and how they choose to apply their methods is different. The change of a time we see in Khonsu is an illustration of a kind of unification of opposites and an integration of the darker side. The Egyptians didn't reject his dark past or make him pay for the deeds after a redemption, like Darth Vader. He's allowed to join the light and the dark together, to use the dark in service of the light, and he is celebrated for it. It's surprising how rare this is in storytelling. Maybe it's just uncomfortable for us to think of someone who has done unquestionably terrible things to go unpunished, and furthermore to become a hero. Maybe that's the reason the redeemed villain often dies or rejects their powers entirely, so we can feel that sense of justice. The other path, Khonsu's path, is one of integrating the dark and wielding it in a new context, and we are less comfortable with this. For good reason. It could go wrong very easily. It seems unstable. This seems to be perfectly set up for the new Moon Knight show. In the comics, Moon Knight was originally, again, a mercenary who becomes a servant of Khonsu, who tasks him with hunting down and punishing the wicked. There's also an aspect of insanity when it comes to Moon Knight. Someone took the lunar slash lunacy thing to heart when creating him and couldn't resist the pun, maybe. And in this shot, we see what looks like Khonsu depicted on screen as he is in the comics, with the skull of a falcon. I'm looking forward to seeing how Khonsu and ancient Egyptian myth is portrayed on the show. In the end, we don't have nearly as much information or stories about the actual Khonsu as we do for the main Egyptian gods, but his 1,000-year arc, traveling from darkness to light, is a unique and captivating story, and he certainly left his mark on the rich mythology of one of mankind's oldest civilizations.