Set

Hot wind off the desert. Sand rising in a brown column that swallows horizons. Somewhere inside that storm, in the oldest Egyptian belief, walks a god who is both the storm and the thing the storm wants to break. His name is Set, and he is one of the strangest, most violent, and most necessary figures in the ancient world.

He was born in the second generation of the Egyptian pantheon, son of Geb the earth and Nut the sky, brother to Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys. The Pyramid Texts already know him. By those earliest accounts he is a god of the Red Land, the desert that crouches outside the green ribbon of the Nile, and a god of storms, war, and foreign peoples. Nephthys was given to him as wife, though in most stories her devotion lay quietly with Osiris, and that small fact ran like a fault line under the whole family.

The Egyptians never settled on what Set looked like, because the creature they drew was not an animal anyone could find. The Set animal, the sha, has a tall lean canine body, square-cornered ears clipped flat at the top, slanting almond eyes, a long downward-curving snout, and a stiff forked tail held upright like a pennant. Generations of Egyptologists have argued for aardvark, donkey, fennec fox, oryx, jerboa, even okapi. None of them fit. The simplest reading is that the Egyptians invented a creature for him because no real one would do. His sacred color was red, the color of the desert sand and of dried blood. Other forms attached themselves over time: the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the pig, the donkey, all animals the Egyptians considered dangerous, unclean, or both.

He had a job before he had a story. Each night, the sun god Ra travelled by boat through the underworld, and each night the great serpent Apep rose out of the dark water to swallow him. The other gods on the barque hung back. Set stood at the prow with his forked spear and drove it into the serpent’s coils, again and again, until the boat was past. The work was bloody and it never ended. Apep could not be killed, only delayed. Without Set, dawn would never come.

The story everyone remembers is uglier. Osiris was the rightful king of Egypt, beloved of his people, married to his sister Isis, and the variants of the tale agree only on the outcome. Some say Set tricked Osiris into climbing into a coffin built to his exact measurements at a banquet, then sealed the lid and threw it into the Nile. Others say he simply caught his brother alone and tore him into fourteen pieces, scattering them across the country. Either way the result was the same. Isis recovered the body, or what could be recovered of it, and with the help of Nephthys revived Osiris long enough to conceive their son Horus. Then Osiris went down into the land of the dead and stayed there. Set took the throne, and storms came, and the rivers ran wrong.

He did not keep it.

Horus grew up hidden in the marshes, came of age, and demanded justice from the gods. What followed is recorded in a single Ramesside-period text called The Contendings of Horus and Seth, preserved on Chester Beatty Papyrus I, and the dispute drags on for eighty years. There are races between stone boats. Transformations into hippopotamuses. Ambushes in the marshes. Lawsuits before the divine tribunal. Horus loses an eye. Set loses a testicle. The most peculiar episode involves Set inviting his nephew home and attempting to assert dominance through forced sexual contact, only for Horus to catch his uncle’s seed in cupped hands and throw it away. Isis then arranges for Set to unknowingly eat lettuce, sacred to fertility and considered a kind of phallic plant in Egyptian thought, soaked with Horus’s own seed. When the court summons each god’s semen in turn, Horus’s answers from inside Set’s body and emerges from the top of his head as a golden solar disc. Thoth seizes the disc as a crown. The throne is awarded to Horus. Set is left with the desert, the storms, and the night watch on Ra’s boat.

He had not always been so reduced. In Upper Egypt, at the city of Ombos, his oldest cult had honored him without irony for centuries. The Hyksos kings who ruled the delta in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE took him as their own and identified him with the Canaanite storm god Baal, worshipping the syncretic figure as Seth-Baal at Avaris. When the Ramessides came to power their family came from the same district, and they named themselves for him: Seti the First, Seti the Second, Setnakht (“Set is strong”). For a few centuries he stood among the four greatest gods of Egypt alongside Amun, Ra, and Ptah. Then Egypt began to fall to outsiders. Late period scribes scraped his name off the temple walls. By Greek and Roman times he was identified with Typhon, the monstrous enemy of the gods, and his cult was effectively gone.

His powers run wide. He commands the wind and the sand, the lightning and the thunder. He is preternaturally strong, strong enough to lift Apep clean out of the underworld water on a forked spear. He shifts shape at will, hippopotamus most often. He moves easily across borders no other Egyptian god could cross, into foreign lands, into the wastes, into the dark. His was-scepter, that strange forked staff topped with his own animal head, became one of the most common symbols of divine power in all of Egyptian art, carried by gods and pharaohs alike.

His weaknesses are quieter. He cannot be subtle. Nearly every contest he loses to Horus is lost to a trick: the lettuce, the painted boat, the missed ambush. He is also alone in a way no other major Egyptian god is alone. Nephthys keeps her distance. His followers were always concentrated in a few districts and tied to a few dynasties. When the political wind shifted, he had no constituency to defend him. The Egyptians who once feared and bargained with him picked up the chisel and let him fall.

What survived of him in the end was a question the Egyptians had been asking through him all along. They believed in ma’at, in cosmic order, in the careful weight of the heart against the feather. They also believed that without something fierce on the prow of the sun-boat, the serpent would win. The world they imagined needed both. Set was the part they could not love and could not do without.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Set in Egyptian mythology?

Set is the Egyptian god of the desert, storms, disorder, violence, and foreign lands. He is the son of Geb and Nut, brother to Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys, and the husband of Nephthys. He is best known as the murderer of Osiris and the rival of Horus for the throne of Egypt, though he also served as the necessary protector of the sun god Ra during the nightly underworld voyage.

What animal is Set?

Set is depicted as the sha, a mythical creature that does not match any known animal. The sha has a tall lean canine body, square-cornered flat-topped ears, slanting almond eyes, a long downward-curving snout, and a stiff forked tail held upright. Egyptologists have proposed the aardvark, donkey, fennec fox, oryx, jerboa, and okapi, but none of these match, and the simplest reading is that the Egyptians invented the creature because no real animal would do. Set also takes the form of a hippopotamus, crocodile, pig, or donkey, and his sacred color is red.

How did Set kill Osiris?

Set killed his brother Osiris in one of two ways depending on the version of the myth. In one account, he tricked Osiris into climbing into a coffin built to his exact measurements at a banquet, then sealed the lid and threw it into the Nile. In another, he caught Osiris alone and tore him into fourteen pieces, scattering them across Egypt. In both versions, Isis recovered the body and revived Osiris long enough to conceive their son Horus, after which Osiris descended permanently to the land of the dead.

Why did Set fight the serpent Apep?

Set fought Apep each night to protect Ra’s solar barque during its journey through the underworld. Apep, the great serpent, rose from the dark water to swallow the sun god, and while the other gods on the boat hung back, Set stood at the prow with his forked spear and drove it into the serpent’s coils until the boat had passed. Apep could not be killed, only delayed, and without Set’s nightly work the sun would not have risen.

Why was Set’s worship abandoned in ancient Egypt?

Set’s worship was abandoned after Egypt began to fall to foreign powers in the late period. For centuries he had been honored at Ombos in Upper Egypt, adopted by the Hyksos kings as Seth-Baal at Avaris, and elevated by the Ramesside pharaohs Seti I, Seti II, and Setnakht, whose names invoked him directly. Once foreign conquest reframed his association with outsiders as a threat rather than a strength, late period scribes scraped his name from temple walls, and by Greek and Roman times he had been identified with the monstrous Typhon and his cult was effectively gone.

Related Entries

Osiris, Isis, Horus, Nephthys, Geb, Nut, Apep/Apophis, Ra, Thoth, Anubis, Baal, Teshub, Typhon