The Temple of Set affirms self-deification through Xeper, an ancient Egyptian word meaning "to come into being" or "to become," which the Temple takes as its central principle. Founded in 1975 by Michael Aquino after a split from the Church of Satan, the Temple venerates Set as a real deity representing isolate, individual consciousness, and it teaches a path of deliberate self-development by which the practitioner strengthens and immortalises the individual psyche, the aim being the conscious evolution of the self toward a divine condition. Michael Aquino, a former Church of Satan priest, split from LaVey's organisation in June 1975 over both administrative disagreements and a fundamental theological difference: where LaVey held Satan to be a symbol rather than a literal being, Aquino affirmed Set as a real, independently existing intelligence.
Aquino described receiving the Temple's founding document, The Book of Coming Forth by Night, through a ritual working in June 1975 in which he held Set himself dictated the text, including the instruction to use the ancient Egyptian name Set rather than the Judeo-Christian Satan, since the Temple holds Set predates and is independent of that later, and in its view distorting, biblical reworking of the same being.