Oscar Isaac’s debut into the MCU has arrived. Moon Knight’s first episode premiered on Disney+ today, complete with Isaac as the sleepy, disheveled, and incredibly stressed out museum gift ship employee Steven Grant.
Grant, an aficionado of ancient Egyptian mythology, struggles to stay awake at night as he’s tortured by the line between reality and fantasy. Is he really asleep when he’s dreaming? And if so, why are strange things happening during the day? Along the way, he’s introduced to a demanding and intimidating Egyptian moon deity living in his head called Khonshu — which, without giving too much away, explains the show’s titular superhero Moon Knight.
As Grant comes to terms with the fact that his strange dreams may not be dreams after all, he finds himself stalked by a religious cult leader named Arthur Harrow (played by Ethan Hawke). Harrow, an intense figure with long hair, a cane, and broken glass in his shoes, serves the ancient Egyptian goddess Ammit, who appears to be lying dormant, trapped in sleep.
And as it turns out? Ammit is utterly badass.
Let’s go over her track record in Moon Knight’s first episode and why, actually, she is one sick embodiment of the divine feminine.
Who was Ammit?
First off, Ammit isn’t a Marvel creation. She was a real goddess from Ancient Egypt, described on Ancient Egypt Online as the “personification of divine retribution.”
With an enormous crocodile head split between a hippo and lion body, Ammit was probably one of the scarier goddesses you could come across in Egyptian religion. Also called the “Devourer of the Dead,” ending up in front of Ammit’s maw meant you probably deserved it. Simply put: If the Egyptian gods weighed your life on Ma’at’s scales and considered your misdeeds too great, your heart would end up consumed by Ammit. Which was basically akin to dying twice.
Why is Ammit so cool in Moon Knight?
Minor spoilers follow for Moon Knight episode one.
Ammit, in short, is a force of immediate divine justice in Moon Knight. If she thinks you’re a bad person, you’re gone.
Episode one sets this up by showing Ammit’s worshipper Harrow as more than just an eccentric religious figure with a group of heavily armed men at his disposal. Through her power, Harrow can pull a person aside and allow Ammit to judge their soul based on their sins. If they’re deemed good by Ammit’s gaze, they’re spared. And if they’re deemed evil, death immediately befalls them.
Apparently, this power comes from Ammit’s ability to judge a person by their entire lives. Or as Harrow tells Grant, “She grew weary of having to wait for sinners to commit their crime before punishing them. Would you wait to weed a garden till after the roses were dead?”
We love a goddess who cuts through the chthonic red tape and just murders people she doesn’t like. So this is one point in Ammit’s favor.
Additionally, if we trust Harrow at his word (which seems like a very fine and reasonable thing to do, given he most certainly and definitely isn’t the villain of Moon Knight), then Ammit could have prevented some of the worst tragedies in history from ever gracing the planet. This explicitly includes World War II, as Harrow tells Grant. Hitler, gone. Which leaves me to think that, perhaps, Ammit is Good, Actually, and maybe we’re rooting for the wrong god in all of this.
Ammit worship comes with disclaimers
Now to be clear, there are only two downsides I see to worshipping Ammit. The first is that, yes, if you find out you’re a bad person, you drop dead. Ammit doesn’t care if your sins were in the past, present, or future, so if you do something 20 years from now that Ammit doesn’t like, you’re basically fucked.
Be warned: We don’t know if Ammit’s scale-tipping sins could be as simple as leaving your dishes in the sink too long or forgetting to pay your friend back on a late night Lyft. Divinity works in mysterious ways. So living your life based on Ammit’s arbitrary discretion naturally poses a lethal danger.
The other problem is that Ammit seems to directly endorse this random white man’s violent religious cult, given she grants him direct access to her power. Participation involves a 50/50 chance you could die for shit you haven’t done yet that you didn’t know was wrong.
Or you may survive Harrow’s scale-tipping ritual, only to have to pick up a gun and kill a random American mercenary who has the power of your goddess’ rival deity at his fingertips. Given Marvel’s series is called Moon Knight and not Ammit Knight, this does not bode well for your survival. So this is strike two against Ammit worship: You are probably going to die one way or another.
But with those cons out of the way? Ammit as a Marvel goddess sounds pretty fine to me. She punishes bad people and condones good people. That’s a divine girlboss thing to do. When was the last time you saw Loki do that, huh? I rest my case.
Granted, Ammit wasn’t actually worshipped in Ancient Egypt, she was more a force of order and nature, as opposed to a goddess people would actively seek out to honor and praise with prayer. But we’ll ignore all that for the sake of Moon Knight lore. Praise Ammit!
(Image: Marvel)
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Published: Mar 30, 2022 03:29 pm