Set

Set is among the most instructive of Egyptian gods because his moral valence changed dramatically over three thousand years. God of storms, the desert, foreign lands, and violent disorder, he is the murderer of his brother Osiris in the central Egyptian myth, dismembering the body, seizing the throne, and warring against Osiris's son Horus for the kingship, a conflict resolved in Horus's favour and read as the triumph of ordered rule over usurpation. Yet Set was not simply a devil.

For long stretches of Egyptian history he was a respected and even royal god: kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty (Seti, "man of Set") bore his name, and above all he was the indispensable defender of the sun god Ra, standing at the prow of the solar barque each night to spear the chaos-serpent Apophis, the one god violent enough to protect the cosmos from a greater chaos. Only in the later periods, and especially under foreign domination, was he progressively demonized and identified with Egypt's enemies. Set embodies a sophisticated theological intuition: that disorder and violent force are not simply to be abolished, but are a real and sometimes necessary power within the world, dangerous and useful by turns.

Set was not always the villain of Egyptian religion. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms he was a legitimate and in places genuinely honoured god, associated with the desert, storms, and foreign lands, and paired with Horus in royal titulary and temple imagery as a symbol of the two halves of Egypt united under one king rather than as a defeated enemy. His decline into the murderer of Osiris and permanent opponent of Horus that most people now know hardened considerably later, and it hardened for reasons historians connect directly to politics rather than pure theology.

During periods when Egypt was ruled or threatened by outsiders, notably during and after Hyksos rule and later under Persian and Greek domination, Set's long association with foreign lands made him a convenient symbol for foreign invasion and disorder, and his cult and imagery suffered accordingly, with some monuments showing his images deliberately defaced in later periods. Reading Set's mythology as a single fixed story of cosmic evil misses this, since the Egyptian sources span roughly three thousand years and show a god whose moral standing moved with the political fortunes and anxieties of the civilization that worshipped him, from valued protector to scapegoat, rather than a villain fixed in place from the beginning.