Family: Set Merksamer, Seteh

Set /sɛt/ or Seth /sɛθ/ (Egyptian: stẖ; also transliterated Sheth, Setesh, Sutekh, Setan, Seth
Merksamer, Seteh,[a] Setekh, or Suty) is a god of chaos, fire, deserts, trickery, storms, envy,
disorder, violence, and foreigners in ancient Egyptian religion.[1] In Ancient Greek, the god's name is
given as Sēth (Σήθ). Set had a positive role where he accompanies Ra on his solar boat to
repel Apep, the serpent of Chaos.[1] Set had a vital role as a reconciled combatant.[1] He was lord of
the red (desert) land, where he was the balance to Horus' role as lord of the black (soil) land.[1]
In the Osiris myth, the most important Egyptian myth, Set is portrayed as the usurper who killed and
mutilated his own brother Osiris. Osiris's wife Isis reassembled his corpse and resurrected her dead
husband long enough to conceive his son and heir Horus. Horus sought revenge upon Set, and the
myths describe their conflicts.
In ancient Egyptian astronomy, Set was commonly associated with the planet Mercury.[2]
Family[edit]
Set and Nephthis, 1279-1213 BC, stone, Louvre
Set is the son of Geb, the Earth, and Nut, the Sky; his siblings are Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys. He
married Nephthys and fathered Anubis; and in some accounts he had relationships with the foreign
goddesses Anat, and Astarte.[3]
Origin[edit]
The meaning of the name Set is unknown but it is thought to have been originally pronounced
*sūtiẖ [ˈsuw.tixʲ] based on spellings of his name in Egyptian hieroglyphs as stẖ and swtẖ.[4] The Late
Egyptian spelling stš reflects the palatalization of ẖ while the eventual loss of the final consonant is
recorded in spellings like swtj.[5] The Coptic form of the name, ⲥⲏⲧ Sēt, is the basis for the English
vocalization.[4][6]
Set animal[edit]
Main article: Set animal
In art, Set is usually depicted as an enigmatic creature referred to by Egyptologists as the Set
animal, a beast resembling no known creature, although it could be seen as a composite of
an aardvark, a donkey, a jackal, or a fennec fox. The animal has a curved snout, long rectangular
ears, a thin forked tail and canine body, with sprouted fur tufts in an inverted arrow shape;
sometimes, Set is depicted as a human with the distinctive head. Some early Egyptologists
proposed that it was a stylised representation of the giraffe, owing to the large flat-topped "horns"
which correspond to a giraffe's ossicones. The Egyptians themselves, however, made a distinction
between the giraffe and the Set animal. During the Late Period, Set is depicted as a donkey or as
having a donkey's head.[7]
The earliest representations of what might be the Set animal comes from a tomb dating to
the Amratian culture ("Naqada I") of prehistoric Egypt (3790 BC–3500 BC), though this identification
is uncertain. If these are ruled out, then the earliest Set animal appears on a ceremonial
macehead of Scorpion II, a ruler of the Naqada III phase. The head and the forked tail of the Set
animal are clearly present.[8]
Conflict of Horus and Set[edit]

A major element of Set's mythology was his conflict with his brother or nephew, Horus, for the throne
of Egypt. The contest between them is often violent but is also described as a legal judgment before
the Ennead, an assembled group of Egyptian deities, to decide who should inherit the kingship. The
judge in this trial may be Geb, who, as the father of Osiris and Set, held the throne before they did,
or it may be the creator gods Ra or Atum, the originators of kingship.[9] Other deities also take
important roles: Thoth frequently acts as a conciliator in the dispute[10] or as an assistant to the divine
judge, and in "Contendings", Isis uses her cunning and magical power to aid her son.[11]
The rivalry of Horus and Set is portrayed in two contrasting ways. Both perspectives appear as early
as the Pyramid Texts, the earliest source of the myth. In some spells from these texts, Horus is the
son of Osiris and nephew of Set, and the murder of Osiris is the major impetus for the conflict. The
other tradition depicts Horus and Set as brothers.[12] This incongruity persists in many of the
subsequent sources, where the two gods may be called brothers or uncle and nephew at different
points in the same text.[13]
Horus spears Set, who appears in the form of a hippopotamus, as Isis looks on
The divine struggle involves many episodes. "Contendings" describes the two gods appealing to
various other deities to arbitrate the dispute and competing in different types of contests, such as
racing in boats or fighting each other in the form of hippopotami, to determine a victor. In this
account, Horus repeatedly defeats Set and is supported by most of the other deities.[14] Yet the
dispute drags on for eighty years, largely because the judge, the creator god, favors Set.[15] In late
ritual texts, the conflict is characterized as a great battle involving the two deities' assembled
followers.[16] The strife in the divine realm extends beyond the two combatants. At one point Isis
attempts to harpoon Set as he is locked in combat with her son, but she strikes Horus instead, who
then cuts off her head in a fit of rage.[17] Thoth replaces Isis's head with that of a cow; the story gives
a mythical origin for the cow-horn headdress that Isis commonly wears.[18]
In a key episode in the conflict, Set sexually abuses Horus. Set's violation is partly meant to degrade
his rival, but it also involves homosexual desire, in keeping with one of Set's major characteristics,
his forceful, potent, and indiscriminate sexuality.[19] In the earliest account of this episode, in a
fragmentary Middle Kingdom papyrus, the sexual encounter begins when Set asks to have sex with
Horus, who agrees on the condition that Set will give Horus some of his strength.[20] The encounter
puts Horus in danger, because in Egyptian tradition semen is a potent and dangerous substance,
akin to poison. According to some texts, Set's semen enters Horus's body and makes him ill, but in
"Contendings", Horus thwarts Set by catching Set's semen in his hands. Isis retaliates by putting
Horus's semen on lettuce-leaves that Set eats. Set's defeat becomes apparent when this semen
appears on his forehead as a golden disk. He has been impregnated with his rival's seed and as a
result "gives birth" to the disk. In "Contendings", Thoth takes the disk and places it on his own head;
in earlier accounts, it is Thoth who is produced by this anomalous birth.[21]
Another important episode concerns mutilations that the combatants inflict upon each other: Horus
injures or steals Set's testicles and Set damages or tears out one, or occasionally both, of Horus's
eyes. Sometimes the eye is torn into pieces.[22] Set's mutilation signifies a loss of virility and
strength.[23] The removal of Horus's eye is even more important, for this stolen Eye of
Horus represents a wide variety of concepts in Egyptian religion. One of Horus's major roles is as a
sky deity, and for this reason his right eye was said to be the sun and his left eye the moon. The
theft or destruction of the Eye of Horus is therefore equated with the darkening of the moon in the
course of its cycle of phases, or during eclipses. Horus may take back his lost Eye, or other deities,
including Isis, Thoth, and Hathor, may retrieve or heal it for him.[22] The Egyptologist Herman te
Velde argues that the tradition about the lost testicles is a late variation on Set's loss of semen to
Horus, and that the moon-like disk that emerges from Set's head after his impregnation is the Eye of
Horus. If so, the episodes of mutilation and sexual abuse would form a single story, in which Set
assaults Horus and loses semen to him, Horus retaliates and impregnates Set, and Set comes into
possession of Horus's Eye when it appears on Set's head. Because Thoth is a moon deity in
addition to his other functions, it would make sense, according to te Velde, for Thoth to emerge in
the form of the Eye and step in to mediate between the feuding deities.[24]
In any case, the restoration of the Eye of Horus to wholeness represents the return of the moon to
full brightness,[25] the return of the kingship to Horus,[26] and many other aspects
of maat.[27] Sometimes the restoration of Horus's eye is accompanied by the restoration of Set's
testicles, so that both gods are made whole near the conclusion of their feud.[28]

Family: Set Merksamer, Seteh

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Set /sɛt/ or Seth /sɛθ/ (Egyptian: stẖ; also transliterated Sheth, Setesh, Sutekh, Setan, Seth

Set and Nephthis, 1279-1213 BC, stone, Louvre

Conflict of Horus and Set[edit]

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