The God Khonsu, the moon deity, which is very appropriate for the time of year whose name means The Wanderer, is all about Moon magic in ancient Egypt which is quite an important topic and I guess quite Central to our magical system based as it is around the lunar calendar.
Khonsu being a Luna deity, not the only one, but it is quite Central to that so for the ancient Egyptians this would be the first month of Summer which is also where some of us are now . In the Egyptian tongue or the late version of it, the word is Pachons which you can break down into an Egyptian phrase per-en-khonsu “ the one of Khonsu” which can be contracted to Pachons.
The month of Khonsu is a very good example of this idea that within the Egyptian world view, every month of the cycle throughout the year of lunar months would be dedicated to one particular deity. Some of these were replaced and or lost as time went by but originally that would be the idea that each month of the year, through the seasons, is especially sacred to a particular deity. This month has retained its Khonsu connection, the moon God for a lunar month .
The Wanderer which is an obvious reference to the moon's fast moving and irregular cycle. Egyptian Luna deities are, I would say, invariably male. Other examples would be Horus and Set. Which shows, as people have long recognized, that there's no simple equation of males being solar and females being lunar, which is sometimes heard within the Neo Pagan Theology and other theologies as well. Perhaps the metaphor of male and female as plus and minus, maybe you'd say for the Egyptians that wasn't quite as important. It wasn't the only way that they represented this important idea of a binary relationship between things.
Within Egyptian culture, a binary relationship between a pair of gods is a very important motif. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be male and female. It's an option but there are other ways of showing the same thing. And just to confuse things even more, the categories of male and female are a little bit more flexible within the Egyptian system and it would be possible to find a male lunar deity who has what is usually thought of as female attributes such as the capacity to “give birth”. As indeed Set gives birth to Thoth, one Moon God giving birth to another. This is a very interesting piece of mythology which we probably have to go into sometime, but which we'll leave that for now, because it's such a rich area.
As I say, this interplay of important principles is often using sexual metaphors but they can be male/female male/male or female/female and other counterparts and there can also be sexual aspect that are just not the kind of strict male / female modality, which for them was not the only game in in town. Quite a lot of interactions between the Egyptian gods are between those nominally of the same gender male and male or female and female and the homoerotic aspect of that was not avoided by the Egyptians it's just not really thought to be anything you always had to comment on. Or they may have seen it as just part of life as far as they were concerned. So for instance the sun god Ra, the nocturnal sun can be another way of referring to the Moon. In this mythology the nocturnal sun, the Sun at midnight, is the Moon. And he has an important union to consummate with another underworld deity, the lord of the dead or Osiris. And when they come together and form a new entity, there's definitely a kind of sexual component to it, which they just didn't really feel that they had to comment on.
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