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Set — Description

There are few statements as persistently deterministic as “The sun'll come out, tomorrow”. It's always a day away. For 4.5 billion years, we have had this 92 trillion megaton nuclear detonation perpetually hovering across our sky, shedding light and warmth in more quantities than anyone could possibly know what to do with. Even through our Six Great Mass Extinctions, those apocalyptic times when all life on our fragile blue marble was knocked to its knees, when the sky turned black and only a third of all souls were left to inherit the ashfall, still the sun rose again the next morning, still it does to this very day. It will be there when the clouds part, and it will shine on someone else long after we have come and gone through the privilege of life. No matter what happens, no matter how badly anyone fucks up down here, the sun will come out tomorrow. It is a mathematical, cosmological certainty.
Imagine then that it's 3500 BCE and for the past 11,000 years of the generations of man, you by all appearances seem to be the Sun's chosen people. For millennia, the all-seeing eye has rode across the sky in the talons of a falcon, and risen each day on the paradisal garden it has placed you in. Your braying animals graze freely on 2 trillion acres of open, rolling savana, its soil black and rich, pump-fed by great lakes and forking deltas. Your well-fed family wakes up each morning to behold a splendid dawn swimming with crocodiles and canopied by giraffes. Life is good. Life has always been good. And then one day it's less good. It's a little toastier than usual, there's less swelt in the air. It's making you thirsty, but the rivers are drying up. The Sun is still rising but there's fewer and fewer shrubs engorging on its light. There is less grass today for your goats to graze as they had in the generation of your grandfather, and tomorrow still there will be even less. From your perspective, the desert has encroached upon and stolen all the generous bounty that your good lord the Sun had previously bestowed upon you. The African Humid Period has ended, the Sahara has turned to sand between your quivering fingers, and you are running out of options to feed your family.
There's all of one place left where the lifestyle you're used to remains resilient, one green stripe in an ocean of ominous, hungry desert. Here along the Nile, someone must be doing something right to retain the Sun's favors, men who built walls around them to keep the grain hoarded and the desert out. The men who strong-armed their way into the position of head bureaucrat of these delicate operations showered themselves in gold from the cliffs outside of Naqada and buried themselves with it, separating themselves even in death from the commoner filth who had no argument against their claim to divine providence. Was this “King Scorpion” guy actually the chosen son of Horus as he claimed? Fuck man who cares, he's letting us stay in his city and feed our animals, we'll do whatever he damn well says. It's not like we have anywhere else to go if we wanted to ditch this whole urban megaproject he's working on. Either the scorpion will sting our frogbacks himself for treason, or we walk into the desert and get eaten by jackals. Eventually we'll convince ourselves again that life was always good, and that it was always good because we always did as the king commanded us. The king afterall is the only one who preserves the Sun's divine order, by all outward appearances, and we should be grateful that he is so generous and honorable enough to hold our food hostage for our own good.
“King Scorpion”, King Scorpion II no less, is the name which modern egyptologists assign to a king who's name is plastered all over the ruins of Predynastic Upper Egypt, that stretch of the Nile south of the Delta and the Faiyum which had not yet unified with the petty kingdoms of the more fertile Lower Egypt. We call him that because when he reigned circa 3200 BCE, hieroglyphic writing was still in its uncodified infancy, so instead of using a legible word to write his name, his signature was just an emoji of a scorpion, and that's all the information we can glean. He's who was in charge directly before Narmer, the first Pharaoh of a united Kingdom of Egypt. King Scorpion may be Narmer's father, or it may just be the nickname Narmer was advertising himself by before marching north and absorbing Lower Egypt under his dominion, again there's just not enough information to tell. His realm included such cultural hot spots as Thinis, Abydos, and most important to our discussion today: Hierakonpolis. Excavations under the settlement's temple to Horus conducted by British egyptologists James Quibell and Frederick Green in 1898 yielded an artifact we refer to as the Scorpion Macehead, named for the king who supposedly commissioned the piece to stroke his already massive ego. It's a chunk of limestone bout the size of a small watermelon carved around its circumference with a scene of King Scorpion opening a dyke in the Nile to sanctity the temple grounds. Above him dangles a ring of lapwings hung by the neck until dead, each one's gallows adorned with an animal or otherwise abstract symbol which represent the polities Scorpion has thus far conquered and the gods they worshipped, all those who tried to resist the rise of the son of Horus.
One of the admittedly hard-to-make-out animals crowning the macehead holds the honor of being the oldest easily recognizable depiction of what's often called the “Typhonic Beast”. Everyone is, to this day, scratching their heads over what exactly this cryptid is. It looks like an anteater trying to casually pretend he didn't just swallow a greyhound like they're two chupacabras in a trench coat. Everyone and their mom has a different proposal for what species this is supposed to be an artistic representation of, everything from jackals to okapis to aardvarks. Some insist that it's not a real animal at all, but rather a mythological composite scavenger, the monster that munches on your bones when you stray too far into the middle of nowhere. Me personally it reminds me most of Leptictidium but that would just be silly. I honestly think it's a lot less complicated than people make it out to be. Like… it's so obviously a dog no? Like one of those zoomies ass greyhound lookin breeds common in that corner of the world? They got a bit of a droopy thing going on, and I think the square ears just means they're cropped, surely? For the record: do not crop your dogs’ ears. It provides literally no benefit to your dog to mutilate it, and it puts your animal at permanent risk. If you're gonna try to argue that it reduces snags or disease, consider for a second how absolutely batshit cutting one's ear off to prevent an ear infection would sound if you were proposing this as a solution for a human. I hate that I even have to explain this at all.
However you diagnose it, the Typhonic Beast is more accurately addressed by its proper name in egyptological circles, the Set Animal, after the god whose head is one of these things. The etymology of Set (or “Sutekh” as it would've been pronounced in Ancient Egyptian, “Set” or “Seth” are the Greek renderings) has been, perhaps appropriately, lost to the sands of time. Though his iconography extends back into the Predynastic period, his name is not spelled out in legible hieroglyphics until the Pyramid Texts nearly an entire millennium later, so the form we receive in archaeology is already garbled beyond its original intention anyway. The Egyptians themselves punned the name with words for grinding, abandonment, drunkenness, while Plutarch is under the impression that it means overmastering, overpowering, or compelling. He's the god of the desert and storms, those red lands which threatened to close Nile civilization in on itself, the god of rebels and entropic chaos.
Now, the Pyramid Texts are essentially guided meditation for the ghosts of rich people. These are the lines upon lines of spells inscribed onto the walls of Pharaohs’ tombs during the Old Kingdom's Sixth Dynasty, though the oldest of them are from the tomb of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty (he died about 2345 BCE, for the curious). They're the sort of shit you cinematically brush your fingers against while Lara Crofting your way through a dungeon crawl, meant to guide your soul to the afterlife. Originally reserved for the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh alone, word eventually got out that there's scribbles that can get you into the rich people's superheaven and this of course became a highly sought-after commodity. During the Middle Kingdom, anyone who could afford to be buried in a box at all had personalized spells inscribed on the interiors of their sarcophagi, referred to as the Coffin Texts, and the ritual would be further democratized into the Book of the Dead, individualized scrolls which could be buried with a person to grant them access to the paradisal Field of Reeds. To understand (and vastly oversimplify) the mechanism by which these spells were understood to have worked, consider the Egyptian conceptualization of the soul. If you have a minute of course, but I assume if you're here then I've already stolen your time.
Broadly, the Egyptians believed you're made of three key parts: the body, the ka, and the ba. The ka is the sort of vague animating force which keeps your blood pumping, your neurons firing, and the general homeostasis of your meat bag ticking until it leaves your body upon your death. Kinda like… imagine you're in a simulation and your player goes permanently AFK, it's like that. Your ba however, the part that is you, your thoughts, memories, personality, and consciousness, remains stuck in your body when you die, like some horrific existential form of sleep paralysis. This is why they mummified you, because otherwise your mind will be trapped in a hellish stillness which is rotting off of you by the second, good lord. That's where these funerary spells come in, half map, half instruction manual for your ba to escape the body and follow the route back to your ka, thus reuniting you into a complete and immortal “akh”. This was usually accomplished through a sort of… spiritual roleplay? The Egyptians believed in a nebulous sort of pantheism where two beings can traverse and occupy the same point in space and time simultaneously, thus becoming indistinguishably one being for all intents and purposes. Connecting with a god in this religion meant mind melding with them until you can't tell the difference between your memories and theirs. If you've played Assassin's Creed, it's basically how the Animus works. It's not just the king is repeating an approximation of a ritual associated with a god, they're literally transformed into Osiris in order to go through his death and resurrection, as it happened and when it happened, so that the king can reap the benefits of that very resurrection and then carry them out with him when he's ready to eject. This is why the Pharaoh was said to be the living son of the whole pantheon, because he's allegedly got the worldlines of Horus and Set perfectly balanced inside his being, cosmic order personified. The Egyptian word for this is “Ma’at”, represented by the goddess whose feather your heart is weighed against to determine if you get to have an afterlife at all or whether your soul is eaten by the monster Ammit and never seen again.
Okay so get your mind in the head of an ancient Egyptian who believes the Sun dies and gets reborn every day. This gauntlet you avatar into to reach the afterlife is a sort of finitely contained time loop that begins at sunrise. You spawn in as Osiris, who is freshly dead in the dirt. He's dead because his brother killed him, his brother Set. Both of them are children of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, born alongside their sisters Isis, wife of Osiris and goddess of motherhood, and Nephthys, goddess of midwifery. Geb and Nut were themselves siblings, born of the wind god Shu and his sister Tefnut, the goddess of mist. If you think that incest is bad, Shu and Tefnut each came from the spit of the same guy, the primordial father Atum, usually synchrotised as just another face of Ra. Together, this family tree forms a cohesive unit referred to as the “Ennead” (in Greek at least, in Egyptian it's “Pesedjet” but both literally just mean "The Nine”), the nine gods who get to sit at the cool kids’ table and keep the clockwork of spacetime ticking. Yes, this includes Set, the god of chaos, breaking things, and cotton candy clouds that rain chocolate milk. Even disruption has an honored place in the cosmic scheme, it seems.
Or at least, he did, until he murdered his brother. Why would he do such a thing? Osiris was everyone's favorite, even dad's. Osiris was the oldest, he was destined to succeed his father as king of the earth, and he was also a brat. The exact quote put in Set's mouth by the Pyramid Texts of Pepi I when he's asked to explain his actions is, “It was not against him that I did this. In fact, he was attacking me. In fact, he has been kicking me!” I won't lie, that had me on the floor for a solid half hour. It's such a “don't make me turn this car around” sort of thing, it's so funny. They're just brothers, I love that. Sibling rivalries can turn ugly however if the scales are skewed and one decides they'd had the fuck enough of this treatment. Set mauls the shit out of his brother, spitting on his corpse and dismembering it limb from limb. As he's having a grand old laugh between the carnage and the I-told-you-to-stops, Set turns to the open doorway to see his sisters mortified at what he's done. Seeing them break into fearful tears, Set doubles down with his Cheshire grin and slurps up his brother's blood in front of them like a filthy, twisted scavenger. He will be king of the Pride Lands now, as he has made abundantly clear to anyone who may disagree.
Time passes, however, and that is Osiris's greatest benefit against the machinations of his brother. His son Horus finds him at last in the Duat one day and promises that he will put him back together. The restored (i.e. mummified) Osiris is then hoisted over Horus's shoulder like a sack of spuds, and this is where the deceased Pharaoh's camera shifts onto Horus as the defender in this particular escort mission. Horus's goal is to cross the sky and... well I guess get to the other fucking side innit? The road this particular chicken is crossing is the Milky Way, which the Egyptians conceptualized as the heavenly parallel to the Nile River. On Horus's tail the whole time though is Set, screaming how he's gonna put that wad of toilet paper in the ground where he belongs. In the course of their tussle, Set bites out Horus's eye, and Horus in turn grabs Set where it counts and rips them off. Tom and Jerry screams are exchanged, they dick each other in the ass, yes really, and degrade into a general melee while the deceased's camera shifts over to command of Horus's eye.
The Eye of Horus eep eep eeps its way over the Milky Way by way of Thoth's drawbridge wings and calls upon the Ennead to come help the deceased interfere with the fight. The gods do battle with Set in the golden mountains of his realm of Takhbit over control of the eye like some kind of solar soccer match, while the deceased squeezes between Set and Horus in a bid to pull them apart. By the Book of the Dead, this is a role fulfilled by Thoth, which is odd because in the Pyramid Texts they claim Thoth is Set's son, or at least that Thoth like… xenomorphs out of him I guess? They call him the “knife-bearer who emerged from Set”, idk Thoth's his own rant. Point is once the combatants are subdued, Set is hogtied (just in case of course), and the deceased returns the missing body parts to each combatant, by hand no less lmao. The Sun then lowers down a big cartoon ladder leading up to itself and Set is forced to carry Osiris up to immortality like a whipped pack mule. Set's struggles do not end there though, because they run him through a kangaroo court, and it's… weird? Correct me in the comments if I'm wrong but I think the implication here is Set's trying to defend himself by saying there's no way he could've actually killed Osiris because look he's got a new son Horus, then everyone looks over to where Horus was standing and instead there's just Pharaoh Jimm from the Account in his place. No evidence. Geb, Set's own father, whacks his head with a sandal and has him tied to the ground to be slaughtered. “How correct is Osiris!” the gods sing praises, for now that Osiris is returned to his throne, the realm of man will receive abundance from their generous gods.
Now there's a bit of a Groundhog Day element to this time loop, the sequence can be changed. Set is not inherently the scapegoat to be slain. Sometimes he's called on to protect the mummy of the deceased from the slithering agents of decay, protecting his brother from worms, centipedes, and the like. He's a dragon-slayer afterall, the man to call when Ra's below the horizon and needs an escort through the hostile realm of Apep the chaos serpent. Set's the kind of chaos that keeps order in check, whereas Apep is the chaos that swallows the entire clock of existence whole and digests it into heat death. Set doesn't want the universe to be destroyed, that's where he keeps all his beer! I think he genuinely loves his brother, I don't think he'd let anyone kill Osiris but him honestly. Hilariously a woman's touch is all it takes to preserve any of these stupid boys’ dignities. The Pyramid Texts of Pepi II's wife Neith, the same one which includes the Set scaring the shit out of Isis and Nephthys by slurping Osiris's blood detail, also ends with Neith carried up to her afterlife on the shoulders of both Set and Horus, reconciled as she had kept them within her husband in life. You go girl.
Indeed it's the death of the first female Pharaoh of a unified Egypt, Her Highness Sobekneferu, in 1802 BCE which unbalanced the scales between Set and his rival. Leaving behind no heir, the queen's demise plunged Egypt into its Second Intermediate Period. Among the fractured communities who took a swing at independence were Semitic-speaking immigrants who during times of plenty had come looking for work in the eastern half of the Nile Delta area, finding a home away from home in the city of Avaris. Those of you who know your Genesis will recognize this as the historical basis behind the story of Joshua in the Bible, but in egyptological circles we refer to these migrants as the “Hyksos”. They had risen to prosperity as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Dynasties, and they accredited their success to Avaris's patron god, whom the Egyptians called Set, and whom the Hyksos knew as Ba’al.
You likely know Ba'al best through his popularity contest with Steve, he was the other big hotshot in the Levant vying for altar space. He's the big brutish storm god who's in perpetual beef with Death and slew the chaos serpent Lotan, kinda like Thor. When the Egyptians marked the Hyksos as worshipers of Set, himself a big brutish storm god who's in perpetual beef with Death and slew the chaos serpent, the Hyksos saw no real reason to disagree, incorporating Set into their worship as just one of many names and titles that Ba'al already goes by. As in the Biblical summation though, a new Pharaoh arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph, in this case Ahmose, who founded the Eighteenth Dynasty after expelling the Hyksos in 1550 BCE, unifying the kingdom under singular indigenous rule once more. Now this didn't kill Set's reputation immediately, and he continued to be invoked as Ba’al the Sea-Slayer well into the Ramesside Period. This is most famously illustrated in the Year 400 Stele, erected by Ramesses II in order to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Set's reign as king of Egypt. Seemingly referencing the arrival of the Hyksos in some unpinnable way, the Stele upholds Set-Ba'al as one of Ramesses favorite gods, revered as a beloved son of Ra who wards off chaos by defending the solar barque from Apep, something the Pharoah would've wanted to embody as one who was putting down constant rebellions from multiple different fronts. Indeed both his own father and his grandson took the regnal names “Seti”, specifically in honor of the god who helped them pacify the lands and unify their nation. It's a helluva PR turnaround, but it completely shattered alongside everything else during the Bronze Age Collapse. The Sea Peoples ripped through Egypt as they had done at Hattusa and Troy, but of all those great powers it was Ramesses III of the Twentieth Dynasty who was left standing after his expulsion of the raiders in 1179 BCE. Associating with the god of chaos (and especially now, of foreigners) in any way became politically untenable in a time when security was what everyone really wanted. Horus became the favorite child of the pantheon once again, a transition best exemplified in “The Contendings of Horus and Set”, created during this period of restructuring.
This papyrus opens in the divine court of the Ennead, Ra-Atum sitting as judge, pissed off at his kids because he's walked in on them trying to vote Set out without his say. They whine though that it's hardly a vote at all, Horus is Osiris's rightful heir and he's more than capable of ruling! Ra however believes in due process, sees no reason Set is any less of a ruler than Horus, and now that they've gone behind his back, it's going to take extra convincing to expel the god who saves his life every night. Set, hilariously, bluntly proposes I mean put me and the kid back in the ring and I'll just beat the claim to the throne out of him, and everyone’ll get to watch for themselves! Thoth calls that stupid, things start to get a little hot under the collar, and so Atum phones in a third party to resolve the stalemate. His choice of consultation is the four-headed ram god Banebdjedet and Ptah-Tatenen, but Banebdjedet the scamp says mmm actually Ra, I think this situation calls for getting your mother involved. Before Ra even has the chance to go “wait w-”, the Ennead all very loudly agree why that's a great idea! Thoth, send Neith a Dear Princess Celestia straight away! Neith immediately replies with an extremely charged letter of her own saying oh absolutely not son, you are not putting that miscreant on the throne, I just cleaned up everything he broke last time! Why don't you give Set those nice girls of yours Anat and Astarte instead? They have wonderful personalities!
“Horus is a baby”, Ra points down towards the drooling little fledgling lookin more like a potoo than a falcon, getting a little sick of this attitude he's being given by his own fuckin kids. The monkey king Babi then stands up and tells Ra to his face that no one likes him anyway, which gives the old king a straight up heart attack. Woah man, the Ennead all castises Babi, that was totes uncool, too far man, and they all retire for the night. Don't worry about Ra, he's fine, he has a wet dream about Hathor then wakes up the next morning with a fresh laugh in his belly. Alright, kids, we're going to do this the proper way now, Set, Horus, plead your cases to me in your own words. Set's response is fairly straightforward, he says well, I'm the only one strong enough to slay the chaos serpent every night so that you all can continue to exist, you're welcome and I'll be taking that crown now. Thoth and Onuris (the Egyptian god of war) counter really? You're gonna take Osiris's throne from his wife and child who are still alive? Banebdjedet then slaps back by reminding everyone that Horus is, again, an infant who can't tell milk and bleach apart let alone govern a fucking kingdom like Set can. An assortment of “shut up nerd"s follows suit.
Horus, in his mother Isis's arms then plucks his bottle of bird vomit out of his stupid frogmouth, turns to his mother, and quoth, “Not good is this, in sooth, that I should be cheated in the presence of the Ennead, and that the office of my father Osiris should be taken away from me”. I like to imagine he shits his pants immediately after. Isis then clenches her fist like you know what, small baby, you're right! This injustice shant stand! The Ennead falls into immediate agreement with her, says, out loud and egotistically, no no Isis it's okay we were never gonna give the crown to Set anyway lol. Set quite tartly responds one day, imma take this big fuck off whackin stick of mine, and I'm gonna kill every, single one of you, one at a time, one every day :) But, Ra, I'm not going to participate in this court so long as Isis is a part of it. This is not a jury of my peers.
Ra agrees, this much is fair, and orders the Ennead to reassemble on the “Island of the Mist”, everyone except Isis. The ferryman Nemty is given explicit instructions not to give passage to anyone who even looks kinda like Isis. Isis however bribes the boat bird with a shiny object and pulls up to the Island of the Mist disguised as the hottest babe so as to get Set all awooga-ing over her. Set slips away from the gathering just to pounce on a girl alone in the woods, ick. Isis makes a show out of fighting him off, beseeching his mercy for she is but a humble cattle-herder's wife! Please, my husband died and my son is raising his cattle, but then a foreigner pranced in and started threatening my baby with his bare hands if we don't fork over the cattle! Please sir won't you come instead to champion my son's honor? Set, eager to show off in front of a damsel, eagerly accepts, scoffing, “Shall the cattle be given to the foreigner, while the son of the goodman is yet alive? One shall beat the face of the stranger with a stick, and he shall be cast forth, and thy son I shall beset in the place of his father!”
Now the sneakiest part about this is that the Egyptian word “iꜣwt”, meaning “cattle”, is identical to the word for kingly office in the ancient tongue. Isis immediately polymorphs into a kite and carries Set's own words into court, using it to convict him of forfeiting the vote. Set breaks down crying, this is literally a sham trial, and he starts bawling around Ra's ankles that wow, they really just fucking hate me and want me gone! It's all her! She won't leave me alone! Ra at this point is just kinda… defeated. He pulls up to the Ennead later that evening and is like well guys, congratulations, you got what you wanted, Horus gets the crown. You're gonna make those two kids fucking kill each other you know.
Sure enough, Set has decided and proclaimed no, here's what's gonna happen everyone. Isis, you're gonna take that crown off Chicken Little's head, then you're gonna throw your baby into the ocean, where I will kick his fucking ass for the throne. Isis looks at Ra, Ra nods down yes on Isis, and Isis complies. Set and Horus agree man-to-man that this shall be a dual between two hippopotami, naturally, and they just kinda start mud fighting, for three months, winner takes all. Boys :/ Isis though is not about to comply with that deadline and chucks a harpoon into their melee. She curchunks the barb straight through Horus's torso and he gives her the very-much-in-pain thumbs up to reel him in. Her next fish is Set, who screams all manner of obscenities before taking a deep hyperventilation and begging Isis to pull him up out of the brine too. He looks her in the eyes, honestly, pleadingly, I'm still your brother. Isis tears up, she draws him up, they hug wordlessly… and then her head gets taken off.
Horus, evidently, was not happy with this decision, so unhappy in fact that he had to throw his axe like a fuckin boomerang and decapitate his mother. Wow, and I thought I had anger issues. And then he like… squirrels the head up a mountain wtf lmao? The Ennead is just like oh OH- UHHhhh, and they escort her headless body to Ra who's just like w-HAT happened? They explain, and Ra very decisively says alright let's go spank the kid! Set gets to him first however and gores out both his eyes, chucking them into the sky, the Sun and Moon. Set meets the Ennead coming down the mountain, tells them he saw nothing up there, that Horus got away. They believe him until Hathor (who… might be Isis? That's another rant, but the idea is that Thoth meat-glued a cow head onto Isis's stump to suffice) finds Horus just kinda pathetically crawling through the desert, eyeless. She pours milk in his eyes to return his sight, makes a big reveal out of Horus being alive, and Ra commands they make peace.
Set and Horus then… bed… together… We're in ancient Egypt folks, I'm sorry to say it ain't gonna get better. Horus then runs to his mother to show her what Set… gross… left in his hand. Startled, she cuts his hand off and chucks it into the river (don't worry, Sobek finds her a cleaner one to stitch on) and then has Horus provide a sample in a cup which she can taint Set's lettuce garden with. Set takes Horus to court the next day, intending to use his “domination” over his nephew as a basis to secure his kingship. Initially the Ennead boos Horus, but Horus laughs off the accusations, asserts that if anyone was riding anyone it was the other way around. To settle the case, the Ennead calls their two gametes to take the stand as witnesses, and Horus's child births itself out of Set's pregnant forehead. This child is the blindingly radiant Sun Disk which Thoth places on his head before Set can kill it like Homer strangling Bart. This same story appears in the Coffin Texts as a version of the birth of Thoth himself, but that creates some obvious timeline issues.
Set then challenges Horus to a ship race for the throne, I… idk man. Set says they'll make their boats out of stone for presumably no other reason than he wants to make a display out of cutting the top off a mountain. Horus however makes his boat out of wood and just plasters the whole thing in bitumen to make it look like stone. Set sinks, Horus floats, but then Set turns into a hippopotamus and capsizes Horus anyway. The Ennead has to break them up, and Horus himself is starting to get tired of this back and forth. He prays to Neith to settle the score once and for all because, “none knoweth how to pronounce judgement upon us”, I'm never gonna accept him as king, and he's never gonna accept me as king, we need a tie-breaker. The Ennead agrees and assigns Thoth to pen a letter to the guy who… really should've been able to clear this thing up in the first fucking place, Osiris himself. Osiris, obviously, sides with his son's claim over that of the guy who slurped his blood off the floor in front of their sisters. Set finally surrenders, agrees to be taken to the Island of the Mist bound in irons, and when Atum asks him dude what are you doing, Set's just like nah. I'm done. I'm just done. The gods crown Horus and sing his praises. Ptah asks what is to be done with Set, and Ra, for a surprisingly wholesome ending says, “Let Set, the son of Nut, be given unto me, that he may dwell with me and be as my son, and he shall thunder in the sky, and men shall fear him”.
Mortals would indeed come to fear the roaring of Set. His iconography was defaced across Egypt in the coming centuries, his statues plastered over with the more socially acceptable ram's head of Amun. Then the Assyrians steamrolled over Egypt in 673 BCE, then in 524 BCE their new management Cambyses ganked the Apis Bull in front of all Ptah's priests. By the time Alexander the Great was proclaimed Pharaoh by the Oracle of Amun (the same seer whom the the admittedly biased Tacitus claimed exiled Set out of Egypt on the back of a donkey), Set had used up his three strikes and the unanimous decision was that he had to go. To examine how this demonization affected the central myth, let's look at a priestly instruction manual from 307 BCE aptly titled the “Book of the Victory Over Set”.
Penciled by a priest named Pawerem, the text describes a ritual priests would perform in order to cleanse Egypt of Set's presence: sculpt a little model of the evil god out of red wax, tie it up, spit on it, trample it under your foot, impale it on a spear, slash it with a knife, chuck it in a fire, then spit on it again. Harsh, though not as harsh as the rebranded myth the priests are to remind the statue of during the process. This version paints Set as an abomination who caused his mother great pains by clawing his way out of her womb. The text treats him more like a foaming beast that has to be spearpointed back into his kennel after going berserk and killing Osiris. The Ennead drags him imprisoned before Ra and his court, Thoth reports his crimes, and agreeable whispers start nodding between the gods that the only solution left is to feed Set to Ammit, the devourer of souls from which no memory of a person's existence returns.
Geb then pulls up to the angry mob asking why the kids are fighting again, and Thoth explains that Horus has had to avenge his father. Again. Geb puts up no argument, Horus was always his favorite anyway, and he gives his support to crown the boy as king, once and future. Horus's first act as king is, of course, to banish Set from the realm forever, exile him into the lands of the Hyksos, while his temples are torn down in Egypt, and those who still clung to their worship of him weep tearful sobs of loss and grief among the ruins. So, they chop up Set's body just as he had done to Osiris, an easier appetizer for Ammit the Devourer to digest. Set, however, manages to find his way back from his desert exile anyway, returned in force to inflict violent, sacrilegious, terroristic vengeance on those who betrayed him. One fears not consequences when one has absolutely nothing left to lose, afterall. By this point, even Ra has nothing to say to defend his favorite son anymore. Looking on in horror at the waste and devastation Set has left across the land and its temples, Ra bows his head, and utters his final decree: Egypt belongs to Horus, and Set is not to be allowed back in, not under any circumstances. He is to be banished to the desert forever, where the sand will eat him and he will be starved of inhabitants to remember his name. Sentries will be placed at the four cardinal directions to ensure Set cannot find shelter from being forgotten, while Horus the screaming eye will melt his body into oblivion under the blazing sun of Set's own Red Lands. Even his own mother Nut, heartbroken yet exhausted from the continual agony this son has placed on her, concedes to sicking Atum's seven uraei (royal fire-serpents) into the desert to devour Set's heart like a pool of eels. She swears that, despite her motherhood, if Set ever dares try to come across her, she will claw his brains out, personally. Hel's abyssal eyesocket.
It's little wonder then that the Ptolemaic Dynasty equated Set with their own mythology's big bad evil guy, Typhon. Though the Greeks had known about the Osiris myth since at least Herodotus, the version they received wasn't spelled out for us in the modern day until Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus was a Sicilian Greek historian who had taken an extended vacation in Egypt from 60 to 57 BCE, roughly contemporaneous with Cleopatra's conniption with her siblings over who got to be the last Pharaoh of Egypt. Admittedly, his Bibliotheca Historica is more travelog than scripture, and hilariously he begins his rather brief summary of the death of Osiris by clarifying that the entire priesthood insists that mentioning the death of Osiris is a forbidden taboo. Oops ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Set here apparently has twenty-six drinking buddies he gangs up on Osiris with, that's why he chops Osiris up, so that they each can score a trophy. No one raises their hand when Set auctions off Osiris's dick though, so he just kinda shrugs and throws it in the Nile. Isis however, now the uncontested queen of Egypt, has Set hounded down and killed between her and her precious baby boy Horus. Her husband avenged, she ventures out to retrieve all twenty-six of Osiris's missing body parts for proper burial. Wanting to keep the location of his burial secret from anyone who may wish to desecrate it, she distributes a member, one each, to a priest of each temple of Egypt, telling them one at a time that only their temple possesses the true remains of Osiris. She'll even pay them to say it, double win!
But you don't want Herodotus's or Diodorus's version of this story, you've been waiting through 3000 years worth of primary sources to get to the one which most of the Western world are familiar with: that of Plutarch. Plutarch was a 2nd-century Greco-Roman priest of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi who visited Egypt… once, and we're not even sure for how long. While not exactly what I'd like to call a “primary” source on indigenous Egyptian religion, his essay on Isis and Osiris is one of the most narratively dense that has survived in our ancient corpus. Like Diodorus, he swaps out the Egyptian names for the gods with their closest counterparts in the Greek pantheon. I'll do my best to desynchrotize this but just know not all of these names match neatly one-to-one and sometimes it's hard to tell who exactly Plutarch is referring to.
We open with Ra walking in on Geb and Nut committing heinous acts of hanky panky! Unable to tolerate this under his roof, he punishes them by putting a curse on Nut that she cannot give birth to the things growing inside her, not on any month or any year. That's a horror that hit me directly in my Giger spot, good lady Hel. Thoth comes to the rescue though, crushing as he is on Nut, by challenging Khonsu the moon god to a game of checkers which I'm sure he cheated at. Khonsu is gambled out of five days worth of moonlight, the length of an Egyptian week. Thoth, who controls the calendar, apparently, tacks these five days on the end of what was previously a 360-day year. As a paleontologist I find this really funny because we're actually losing days in a year as time progresses (it was 372 days long during the Cretaceous) and the days actually get longer (23 and a half hours a daycduring the Cretaceous), because our planet is spinning like a top and losing momentum, it's slowing down.
I'll figure out how to splice that lore later but the point is Isis now has five days out of the year, not in any month, on which she can give birth to her five children. Osiris is born on the first day, and his birth is heralded by the invisible voice of Amun booming out a proclamation that “The Lord of All advances to the light”, whatever that means. Geb then entrusts the rearing of the child to some random schmuck named Pamyles who was hallucinating this whole scene while drawing water from the Theban Nile, he seems trustworthy I guess. On the second day is born Horus, no not that Horus this is Horus the Elder. He's like regular Horus, but all grown up, like the Ben 10,000 of Egyptian mythology. He's all grown up already because Isis and Osiris became enamored with each other inside of Nut's womb. Keep up man. Our subject Set was born on the third day, but he was in no way polite about it. This little gremlin punches his way out his mom's uterus the front way and hops out like he's the fucking rat king. “On the fourth day Isis was born in the regions that are ever moist”, thank you Plutarch. Finally the littlest sister Nephthys hobbles out on the fifth birthday. Plutarch seems to be under the impression that her name means “Finality”, because she's the embodiment of the shoreline. It doesn't, it derives from the Egyptian “Nebet-Het” meaning “Lady of the Manor” but I can't deny the writer in me gets a titter out of the implication that the desert is shagging the beach. Plutarch also takes time out of his day to mention that there's an alternative tradition that says no actually Osiris and Horus the Elder were the sons of Ra, and Isis is the daughter of Thoth, and only Set and Nephthys were the children of Geb, which I guess would at bare minimum would decrease the level of incest at play here. I also think Plutarch is trying to imply that Thoth did manage to cuck Geb, which I find ceaselessly entertaining.
Now Osiris grows up to be everyone's favorite king, the fuckin Mufasa of this analogy, and after teaching his people how to cultivate grain, decides to make a pilgrimage to spread agriculture to the rest of the world, asking only they honor the gods as good neighbors in return, that you give as much as you take. While he's away being everyone's favorite person, Set would very much like to scheme behind his back but Isis has those big ol kite eyes on him 24/7. Instead he has to plan to enact his envy upon Osiris in person. Plutarch ups the number of conspirators to an honestly impressive seventy-two guys plus a Queen of Ethiopia named “Aso”, who is just… here. Set, in preparation for catching his roadrunner, had at some point “secretly measured Osiris's body” and had a sarcophagus made to those exact, vacuum seal dimensions. He totes this thing into the festivities being hosted like it's a party, and welcomes this giant bar of gold as a gift to whoever can fit into its exact dimensions. Everyone gives it a swing, but only Osiris makes the fit perfectly, and the second that pompous bastard lays down, the conspirators slam the lid shut, nail it down, and give it a nice chocolatey coating of molten lead. They then chuck it into the Nile, where it's carried out to sea by one of the river's grungier discharges, the Gary, Indiana of Ancient Egypt.
Osiris's ewoks are the first to tattle to Isis, who in inconsolably perpetual mourning runs out into the world begging for anyone who'll stop for information on her husband's whereabouts. The first kind souls to tip her off where they had seen Set casting his brother off are some passing little kids. In her gratitude, Isis bestows the power of prophecy upon all children, which, as someone who works at a children's museum, explains a lot. I once had a kid come up to our window all excited because according to him he knows an animal that's bigger than a blue whale! I say oh cool buddy, I haven't heard of this, whatchya got? And this small child loses all emotion in his face, looks me in the eye, and responds “the Elder Mother”, you know the one who lives at the bottom of the ocean. I look to the mom, the mom looks at me as though I'm supposed to know, and then I spin him a quick yarn of Jörmungandr. It was a delightful interaction, and the unanswered questions continue to haunt me to this day.
The freshly prophetic children then reveal to Isis that Osiris had been tricked by Nephthys into the bedroom by disguising herself as his wife. Nephthys, afraid of what Set would do to her if she didn't, left the baby exposed to the elements. Isis goes looking for the kid, finds it clinging to life, but life still to save nonetheless, and restores the infant Anubis to health. It's a weird set up, especially considering the indigenous Egyptians understood Nephthys as not just barren but also full on Barbie Doll down there, unable to rear children of her own with Set. Indeed Set's only biological son is said to be the evil crocodile demon Maga, who's basically the Hard-to-Destory Reptile, not much in the way of a “mythology” around him. Plutarch takes Nephthys's consortation with Osiris to be a metaphor for drought, which is an elegant visual is nothing else.
Isis jumps through all sorts of hoops and gets a nonzero number of kids killed in her grief-stricken search for her husband. She ultimately finds his coffin inside a pillar in the city of Byblos, but by now it's far too late and Osiris is stinking up the interior of the box. She weeps over the body, and weeping turns to necrophilia, as together they produce Horus from their union. Regular Horus yes, not Horus the Elder, this is the one who's a punk ass baby whose legs barely work yet. This Horus is handed off to the cobra goddess Wadjet in Buto that he may be trained to avenge his father while his mother hides the coffin in a secure location. Evidently though this “secure location” is… right out in the fucking open, because Set stumbles across it while he's out hunting a boar under the light of a full moon. Enraged, he chops Osiris's body up into fourteen parts and scatters them across the swamps, a deed Isis has to go on a whole nother odyssey to undo. She's able to relocate every piece of Osiris save for his junk, which was eaten by fish, and Plutarch copy pastes the story of distributing parts one for each temple in Egypt from Diodorus. He also claims that the Egyptian priests told him personally that they find this entire episode of the story a total misrepresentation of their own beliefs, but shrugs their opinions off anyway, because colonialism.
Osiris's Force ghost then appears to Horus from the Duat to embark one final samurai training montage unto him, and once Horus has proven himself worthy of the blade, Osiris offers one last challenge in the form of two questions: “What is the noblest of all things?” and “What animal is most useful to take into battle?” Horus's response to the first question is predictably, “To avenge one's father and mother for evil done to them”, but his answer to the second catches Osiris off guard. His answer would've been the lion, but Horus asserts that the horse is a better steed, for, “a lion is a useful thing for a man in need of assistance, but a horse serves best for cutting off the flight of an enemy and annihilating him”. Osiris is pleased that his own son has surpassed even him in wisdom, and sends him forth to do battle against he who betrayed them.
Horus barrels into battle, Set gores out Horus's eye and presents it to Ra as a trophy, but Horus is ultimately successful in tying his uncle down. Set is dragged before the queen and her divine tribunal to be put on trial, he defends his claim by pointing out that Osiris is dead and Horus is a baby, but this is of course a kangaroo court and Horus has Thoth as his lawyer. Isis, however, even after all he's done to her and her family, still finds it in herself to forgive Set. Rather than sentencing him to execution, she orders Set released from his bonds and set free to go, a decision the adrenaline-pumped Horus is not happy about. He forcibly removes the crown from his mother's head and slams down in its place a helmet shaped like a cow's head, then Set is chopped into tiny bite sized pieces just as he had done to his brother. Thoth strings a lyre out of his entrails, while the rest of the meat is fed to all of Egypt's unclean animals. Set's soul is therefore scattered in these creatures, and whenever things go wrong in Egypt, these animals assume all the blame, abuse, and execution of the demon they imprisoned. No creature, they say, is more vile among the gods’ creations than the donkey, the same animal the Romans crucified as a heretic and a criminal on a hill in Judea, but I'm sure you already know that story, especially if you've read my Yaldabaoth essay. See ya over there for the real final showdown between the light and chaos.
Design notes, by the gods this was a slog but the end result was sooo worth it. Not only do we have a new and delightfully complex character to play with in our lore, but I'm also just really happy with how the texture came out. I didn't want Set to just be a human with an animal head, I knew I could get more creative than that. I wanted him to have a unstable, almost pixelated quality to his form, ad though there's a shadowy sandstorm that's just itching to burst out of his haze the second he opens his mouth to roar at the sky above. The clothes I think could've been reigned in a little more, I'm still getting used to Egyptian motifs, but at the same time Set strikes me as the kind of guy who likes his fashion a little messy. This is a god who likes being an eyesore, and isn't going to apologize for it.