Set

Set was born on the third of the five epagomenal days, the days won in a dice game with the moon so that Nut, the sky goddess whose arched body spans the heavens, could bear her children despite a curse from Ra, the ageing sun god who had forbidden her to give birth on any day of the year. His father was Geb, the green earth god, and his siblings were Osiris, the future king of Egypt; Isis, the future mistress of magic; and Nephthys, his twin and his wife. Unlike his brothers and sisters, Set would not wait to be born. He tore his way violently from his mother's side, the first act of disruption in a life made of them. The Egyptians gave him the red desert, the scorched wasteland that lay beyond the black soil of the Nile valley, and they called him Great of Strength, the mightiest of the gods. His sacred creature was the sha, the Set animal, a long-snouted, square-eared, fork-tailed beast that has never been matched to any living species, part greyhound, part jackal, part antelope, and wholly other. His bones were said to be made of iron, and the iron that fell from the sky in meteorites was called the metal of heaven and the bones of Set.

Set's defining crime was the murder of Osiris, his brother, who ruled Egypt as a wise and beloved king with Isis at his side. Burning with envy, Set gathered seventy-two conspirators and built a chest of cedar and electrum, measured in secret to fit Osiris alone. At a banquet he offered the glittering coffin as a gift to whichever guest it fitted best. One by one the gods lay down inside, but the chest had been made for the king. When Osiris reclined within it, Set slammed the lid, sealed the seams with molten lead, and hurled the coffin into the Nile. The river carried the living king out to the Great Green Sea, where he drowned, and Isis wandered the world in mourning to recover his body. She found him at Byblos, the Phoenician port where a tamarisk tree had grown around the chest, and she brought him home to Egypt. But Set, hunting by moonlight, discovered the body, and in a rage he hacked Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them across the provinces so that no single tomb could hold him whole. This was the first murder the world had known, and it shattered the age of harmony.

The struggle that followed lasted eighty years. Horus, the falcon-headed son whom Isis had conceived from her murdered husband and raised in hiding in the marshes of the Delta, claimed his father's throne, but Set refused to yield, arguing that the kingdom needed his strength, for he alone could spear the chaos serpent. The case went before the Ennead, the council of nine gods, and in one early telling the earth god Geb simply split the kingdom in two, giving the south to Set and the north to Horus, before regret moved him to grant the whole land to Horus. The two fought on with words, with tricks, and with terrible violence. They raced boats of stone down the Nile, and Horus won by building his vessel of pine and plastering it to look like stone, while Set's true stone boat sank like a millstone. Set transformed himself into a great red hippopotamus and dragged Horus down into the deep water. In the wrestling that followed, Set tore out both of Horus's eyes, which were buried and grew back as lotus flowers, and Horus ripped away Set's testicles, leaving the storm god barren as his desert. Set even tried to prove his mastery by lying with Horus, but Horus caught his uncle's seed in his hand, Isis flung it into the river, and she smeared her son's seed on the lettuce that Set ate each morning. When the gods called the seed of each to testify, the seed of Horus answered from within Set's own body, and a golden disk rose from between Set's brows. At last Isis herself tricked him, appearing as a weeping widow whose son had been robbed of his inheritance by a stranger, and Set, asked to judge the case, declared that a son should inherit his father's goods. By his own words he condemned himself. The tribunal gave the throne to Horus, and Ra, who had always favoured Set, took the storm-lord into his own company as a son, granting him a place in heaven and making his voice the thunder that rolls above the clouds.

Yet Set was never a simple villain, and the Egyptians never forgot his greatest service. Every night the sun god Ra sailed his barque through the Duat, the shadowy underworld, and every night Apophis, the colossal serpent of chaos, rose from the darkness to swallow the boat and extinguish the sun. None of the other gods dared face the monster. Set alone took his stand at the prow, harpoon in hand, and drove his spear into the serpent's coils, forcing it to vomit up the waters it had swallowed so the barque could pass and the dawn could come. Priests in the temples cut up wax models of Apophis, spat on them, and burned them, re-enacting Set's victory so the sun would keep rising. The god of chaos was the only weapon strong enough to hold chaos at bay, and this was why even his enemies called him Great of Strength.

In the earliest history of Egypt, Set was no outcast but a kingmaker. He was the god of Upper Egypt, the southern land, while Horus ruled the north, and when the two halves of the country were united around 3100 BCE, the artists of the kings carved Set and Horus side by side, twin gods binding the plants of the two lands around the symbol of union. His cult city was Nubt, the gold town that the Greeks called Ombos, near Naqada in Upper Egypt, and his square-eared standard has been found in graves laid down around 4000 BCE. In the Second Dynasty a pharaoh named Peribsen set the Set animal above his name in place of the falcon of Horus, a sign of some forgotten civil war, until King Khasekhemwy ended it by taking a name that meant The Two Powers Have Arisen, bearing both gods as his patrons. Centuries later the Hyksos, shepherd kings from Canaan who seized the Delta around 1650 BCE, adopted Set as their chief god at their capital Avaris, identifying him with Baal, their own storm god, and wedding him to the Canaanite war goddesses Anat and Astarte. When native kings drove the Hyksos out, the warrior pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty still honoured him. Seti I, whose name means Man of Set, and Ramesses II, who called himself a son of Set, raised temples to him at Pi-Ramesses, and kings named Setnakhte and Seti II carried his name into battle. But the memory of foreign rule poisoned him at last. From around 700 BCE the Egyptians turned upon their old god. His statues were smashed, his face was chiselled from the monuments, donkeys were hurled from cliffs as his beast, and men with red hair were hunted as his kin. When the Greeks came, they named him Typhon, the monstrous giant who had fought Zeus, and the god who had once saved the sun became the image of evil itself.

Even so, Set never vanished entirely. In the far oases of the western desert his temples still received offerings when the Nile valley had already cursed his name, and at Edfu the temple walls still show the feast of victory in which Horus harpoons the red hippopotamus before the assembled gods, a pageant of Set's defeat carved in the very stone. In the modern world he has been raised again, invoked by occult movements, cast as the dark god of films and games, and studied as the mirror every civilisation holds up to its own violence. He remains the desert wind and the red sky before the storm, the reminder that strength without justice becomes destruction, and that destruction itself has its place in the turning of the world.