The Traveller

Egyptian tradition reads his name as the traveller, or the one who crosses, from a verb for moving through — and what he crosses is the night sky. He is the moon, and at Thebes he is worshipped as the child of Amun and Mut, the third member of a family triad that an enormous temple precinct grew around. The moon in Egypt is not a minor matter: it sets festivals, it is counted, and it disappears and returns on a schedule a priesthood could predict. A god who does that is a god of time before he is anything else.