Set

Set (also Seth or Sutekh) is the Egyptian god of the desert, storms, chaos, violence and foreigners. Son of Geb, the earth, and of Nut, the sky, he belongs to the Heliopolitan Ennead together with his siblings Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, the last of whom is his wife. The Pyramid Texts present him as a primordial and turbulent force; according to Plutarch, he was born by tearing himself from his mother's side before his time, a violent origin that foreshadows his character. He embodies the red desert and the tempests, the powers that oppose the cosmic order of Maat, without which, nonetheless, the balance of the world would not be possible.

The Osirian myth defines the figure of Set. Envious of the throne of his brother Osiris, he murders him through deceit: he has him lie down in a chest made to his measure, seals it with molten lead and casts it into the Nile. When Isis manages to recover the body, Set tears it into fourteen pieces and scatters the fragments throughout Egypt. From this outrage arises the vengeance of Horus, son of Osiris, in the long dispute known as the Contendings of Horus and Set: an eighty-year lawsuit before the divine tribunal, with combats, ruses and mutual mutilations, which ends with the enthronement of Horus as legitimate king and the defeat of Set.

Despite his destructive facet, Set performs an indispensable function in Egyptian cosmology. Each night he travels in the solar barque of Ra through the Duat and, with his spear, strikes down Apophis (Apep), the great serpent of chaos that threatens to devour the sun and prevent its rebirth at dawn. His prodigious strength, the very thing that makes him fearsome, here becomes the guarantee of the continuity of the cosmos. In this ambivalence lies the key to the character: chaotic power and, at the same time, a necessary defender of the solar order against an enemy whom not even the other gods can defeat.

Set is represented with the head of the enigmatic "Set animal" (sha), an unidentified creature with a curved, downward snout, tall square-tipped ears and an erect, forked tail; the hippopotamus, the pig and the donkey are also associated with him, along with the red color of the desert. His cult had its center in Ombos (Nubt, near Naqada) and in Upper Egypt, and enjoyed particular favor among the Hyksos, who adopted him as their patron god, as well as under the Ramesside pharaohs, several of whose names (Seti, Sethnakht) invoke him. In later times, after successive foreign dominations, he was progressively demonized and assimilated to the Typhon of the Greeks, enemy of the gods; his images came to be erased from many monuments.