The Tale of the Possessed Princess
At a Glance
- Central figures: Khonsu, the Egyptian god of the moon and healing; Pharaoh Ramesses II; the Prince of Bekhten; and the possessed princess of Bekhten, sister to Ramesses’ foreign wife.
- Setting: The royal court of Egypt and the distant foreign land of Bekhten, during the reign of Ramesses II; the story is inscribed on a stela found at Karnak.
- The turn: An Egyptian physician dispatched to heal the sick princess determines she is possessed by a powerful evil spirit, and advises the Prince of Bekhten to seek divine intervention rather than mortal medicine.
- The outcome: A statue of Khonsu in his aspect as Expeller of Demons is sent to Bekhten, confronts the spirit, grants it safe passage in exchange for its departure, and the princess is healed.
- The legacy: The statue of Khonsu remained in Bekhten for three years and nine months before returning to its temple at Karnak, where the god’s successful intervention was commemorated on a stela.
A princess lay ill in the land of Bekhten, somewhere far to the northeast of Egypt - Syria, perhaps, or the edge of Mesopotamia. Her healers could do nothing. Her father, the Prince of Bekhten, sent word to Ramesses II, because the sick girl was the younger sister of Ramesses’ own foreign wife, and the prince had no one else to ask.
What the Egyptian physician found when he arrived was not fever, not wasting, not any ailment that roots in the body. The princess was possessed. An evil spirit had taken hold of her, and no medicine prepared from herbs or minerals would dislodge it. The physician returned to Egypt with his instruments still clean and his report plain: the prince needed a god, not a doctor.
The Statue of Khonsu the Expeller
Ramesses turned to Khonsu. Among the gods of Egypt’s vast heavens, Khonsu occupied a specific domain - the moon, time, the expulsion of malevolent forces. He was depicted young, wearing the sidelock of youth and a lunar disk set in a crescent above his brow. His aspect as Expeller of Demons was not a minor epithet but a recognized face of the god, called upon precisely for cases like this one.
The pharaoh did not send a priest or a prayer. He sent a statue - a specific cultic image of Khonsu in his demon-expelling aspect, placed on a sacred barque and dispatched overland with a full procession. It was a considerable undertaking, the kind of state gesture that moved slowly through the heat and distance between Egypt and Bekhten, drawing eyes at every town it passed through.
The people of Bekhten were waiting. They had been watching their princess deteriorate. When the procession came into sight, the relief that met it had been building for months.
The Spirit Speaks
The moment the statue entered the room where the princess lay, something shifted. The spirit felt Khonsu’s presence - the accumulated sacred weight of the god made present through the image - and it did not hold its ground. Speaking from inside the princess, it confessed that it could not resist. It asked for terms.
It would leave, the spirit said. It would vacate her body and return to wherever it had come from, if Khonsu granted it safe passage. No destruction, no binding, no punishment. Simply permission to depart.
Khonsu agreed. The god, manifesting through the statue, accepted the spirit’s terms.
The spirit left. The princess, who had been pinned inside her own body, came back into herself. Her strength returned. The torment that had gripped her was simply gone.
The Prince’s Gratitude
The Prince of Bekhten stood before the statue of Khonsu with the composure of a man who had fully exhausted his own resources before asking for help. His daughter was healed. He made offerings - gifts, tribute, formal thanks directed at the god through his image on the barque.
Then he asked if Khonsu would stay.
A god capable of this, resident in his land: the prince wanted that protection to continue. He was not the first foreign ruler to see practical advantage in cultivating a relationship with an Egyptian deity, and he asked plainly. Could the statue remain in Bekhten?
The statue of Khonsu stayed for three years and nine months. During that time the land had peace, or so the stela records it. The god’s presence, concentrated in the image on its barque, extended its protection over the foreign kingdom the way a lamp extends its light - not diminished by distance from its source, but present wherever it was carried.
The Return to Karnak
Khonsu wished, in the end, to return. A god does not belong indefinitely in a foreign hall, however well kept and however faithfully attended. His temple was at Karnak, in Thebes, in the country of the Nile. The statue needed to go home.
The Prince of Bekhten did not refuse, though the stela suggests he was reluctant. He organized a ceremony of departure - offerings, a formal procession, the kind of ritual farewell that acknowledged the god’s dignity and expressed Bekhten’s ongoing gratitude. The statue was loaded onto its barque again, accompanied now by the gifts the prince had assembled.
When it arrived back in Thebes, the priests of Karnak received it with the reverence due a god returning from a successful mission. The offerings from Bekhten were presented at the temple. Khonsu’s successful journey confirmed what Egyptians already understood about the reach of their gods: the borders of Egypt marked the borders of a political territory, not the limits of divine authority.
The stela recording all of this was carved and set up in the precinct of Karnak, where it remained. The sick princess of Bekhten was healed, the evil spirit had been given its passage and was gone, and Khonsu stood again in his own hall, the lunar disk steady above his brow in the painted half-dark of the temple.