Set

Set (also written Seth or Sutekh) is the ancient Egyptian god of the desert, of storms, of violence and disorder, and of foreign lands, everything outside the fertile, ordered black soil of the Nile valley. He is depicted as the Set animal, a creature with a curved snout, tall squared ears and a stiff forked tail that matches no known species and may be deliberately strange. His central role is in the myth of Osiris: Set murders his brother Osiris out of envy, dismembers the body and scatters the pieces, and then contends for eighty years with Osiris's son Horus for the rulership of Egypt, a struggle finally judged in Horus's favour. In this cycle Set is the principle of chaos and usurpation against which ordered kingship defines itself.

Set's reputation was not always so dark. During the Second Intermediate Period, when foreign Hyksos rulers governed northern Egypt and favoured Set as their own patron, and again under the Ramesside pharaohs of the New Kingdom, several of whom took throne names built on his, Seti I and Sethnakht among them, Set was honoured as a legitimate, even heroic god, the one who stands each night at the prow of Ra's solar barque to fight off the chaos-serpent Apophis and protect the sun's passage through the underworld. Only from the Third Intermediate Period onward, and especially after Egypt suffered repeated foreign conquest, did his image darken sharply into an almost wholly negative figure, his statues in some places deliberately defaced or his name erased from monuments, a reputational collapse that took many centuries to complete.

It would be a mistake, however, to read Set as a simple devil, and Egyptian religion did not. He has an essential positive function: each night, as the sun god sails his barque through the darkness of the underworld, it is Set, strong, violent, fearless, who stands at the prow and spears the monstrous serpent Apophis that would swallow the sun, so that the very disorder he embodies is turned to the defence of cosmic order.

For long stretches of Egyptian history Set was an honoured god, especially around his cult city of Ombos (Naqada) in Upper Egypt, and several pharaohs bore his name. His reputation darkened over time: from the later periods, and particularly after Egypt fell under foreign rulers with whom he was associated, Set was increasingly cast as the enemy, his images sometimes defaced. His changing standing is a caution against reading any Egyptian god as fixed; Set was, at different times and places, both a necessary guardian and the great adversary.