Set
Over the next two weeks I'm going to be touring a bunch of badass Ancient Egyptian temples and ruins, so I figured it might be time to re-acquaint myself with the bonkers mythology of history's first great empire, where basically every god has a kickass animal head, can morph into a variety of man-eating creatures, carries some manner of melee weapon, and basically does all the same fucked-up shit as the Greek gods except they predate those guys by like two thousand years or so.
Let's talk about Set – one of the weirdest, most mis-understood, and bizarre gods in the entire Egyptian pantheon. An animal-headed sex-crazed war god with an indiscernible animal head who defended the Sun God by bashing a giant snake with a huge-ass stick, had his image emblazoned on love potions, and his iconography and name are somehow still the basis for a lot of the mythology surrounding the Christian Satan. Gerard Butler played him in what is perhaps the most mind-annihilatingly terrible movie I have ever seen in my entire life, he was the bad guy in Tutenstein, the final boss of Tomb Raider IV for the PS1, the snake demon god worshipped by the Stygians who fought Conan the Barbarian, and the inspiration for Sutekh in a Tom Baker Dr. Who series called Pyramids of Mars that scared the fuck out of me when I was a kid, yet, somehow he only appeared in two episodes of Stargate SG-1, which seems like it must be an error somehow.
He also inspires art like this. So there must be something to it, right?
Set, or Sutekh, was the Ancient Egyptian god of war, storms, chaos, disorder, foreigners, the desert, the color red, eclipses, thunderstorms, earthquakes, sandstorms, and redheads. He is known as the Instigator of Confusion, the Lord of the Desert, the Ruler of the South, Set the Destroyer, and Sutekh, and his image appears in the hieroglyphics for words like "confusion", "bloodrage", and "murderboner". His friends and cultists also called him Seth, I guess, but I knew like five Seths in high school and none of them really quite exuded the sense of dread and awe I'm trying to convey in this paragraph, so we’ll just stick with Set the Destroyer from here on out.
So one thing that makes the Gods of Egypt pretty high up on the list of badass mythological deities is the fact that pretty much all of them had weird creepy animal heads, and Set’s is not only probably the most badass one, but it’s also the weirdest -- basically, nobody can figure out what the fuck this animal head is actually supposed to be, so historians and mythsogenists just call it “The Set Animal”. Best guesses are that it’s some kind of anteater or jackal or something, and some folks have theorized that it might be some kind of other weird animal that went extinct thousands of years ago, but the hieroglyphic drawings of this guy have so many wild variations that some folks think it might just be part of his trickster image that nobody can figure out how to draw his ears, jaws, or nose, so sometimes he looks like a mildly-irritated aardvark dude and sometimes he looks like the most terrifying nightmare horse demon from hell.
Ok, so the myth of Set changes around quite a bit during the course of Egyptian history, and the reigning theory on that is that Set was the God of Deserts and Foreigners and people liked him a lot better back in the days before Egypt kept getting invaded by foreigners. Basically, in the early days, Set was one of the first five gods created by the Earth God and the Sky Goddess, whose name was Nut, which I find hilarious even though I am struggling to find clever ways to use this information to spice up my dick joke game in this article. Anyway, Earth and Nut produced five kids, and they all banged each other because Ancient Egyptian mythology leads like the headlines on the front page of Pornhub. Set married his sister Nephthys, who is famous in dork town because her name is attached to that eye-searingly terrible website that Pathfinder illogically migrated their SRD over to, but he was kind of all over the place -- he’s kind of a sex maniac, and he also hooked up with the Babylonian Goddess of War, the Phoenician Queen of Heaven, and the Egyptian fertility Goddess Tawaret who has the head of a hippo, but, hey, we’ve all been there at some point I guess. All this humping made Set the god you wanted to pray to when you wanted to hump someone, so you see his image on a lot of early Egyptian love potions, amulets, and promise rings.
Anyway, Set was the second son,, and the first son was Osiris -- the Egyptian god with the green-blue skin that you see on hieroglyphics all the time. We’ll get to why Osiris’s skin is blue (hint: it involves Set), but basically Osiris married his sister Isis, and he became the first Pharaoh and the ruler of the Nile. Osiris and Isis ruled as King and Queen of creation for a really long time, and everything was awesome and prosperous and it was happy fun time blah blah etc., Osiris was a Good King, and Set’s job was to help the Sun God Ra make the sun come up and go down every day. See, the Egyptians had that same thing as the Greeks where the sun is pulled across the sky by a god riding a chariot (Ra stands in for Helios in this case), but the big difference is that when the sun goes down in Egyptian Myth the chariot has to circle around the underside of Flat Earth and theres a giant demon Snake Chaos God under there named Apophis who tries to murder the chariot driver and destroy the sun. In the early days of Egyptian Myth, Set’s job was to help defend Ra from the Chaos God by battling the serpent with a spear every night. Apparently Ra would sometimes get hypnotized by the snake’s eyes and become paralyzed, but Set was immune to that shit and he would inspire hilarious and amazing artwork like this:
I love the snake bug-eyes
Well, all that was working out pretty well for everyone until one day Set’s sister-wife Nephthys fucked his brother Osiris (not cool) and ended up getting pregnant with the kid who would become Anubis, so Set got super pissed and exacted his vengeance by convincing Osiris to lay down in a fucking casket like an idiot, nailing the lid shut, and throwing the casket in the Nile, drowning Osiris and proving once again that evil will always triumph because good is super dumb.
Osiris’s corpse floated out around the Mediterranean for a while until the casket got stuck in a tree somewhere in Phoenicia, and while Osiris was flotsam Set ran shit in Ancient Egypt. Things were a little more chaotic under Set’s rule, but, weirdly, not absolutely horrific, but Osiris’s wife Isis was pretty badass and she looked like the Sorceress from He-Man and she was pretty determined to avenge her husband. She went to Phoenicia, had a series of adventures there, recovered Osiris’s body, brought it back to Egypt, and then started wandering the Nile collecting ingredients for a Phoenix Down that would bring Osiris back from the dead. Before she found all the ingredients though, Set figured out what was going on, found Osirises body, chopped it up into a billion pieces, and then scattered the pieces across the earth. Isis then went on ANOTHER epic quest and recovered all the pieces of Osiris, except she couldn’t recover his dick because that had been eaten by a fish. And because Ancient Egypt didn’t approve of dickless gods, Osiris had to go be the Lord of the Underworld, and his skin is always blue when you see him because he’s fuckin’ dead, bro. Set laughed his ass off, but, still, Isis somehow managed to get knocked up by Osiris somehow (the story goes that she turned into a bird and flew around Osiris’s body until she got pregnant, but I’m pretty sure that’s not really how that works), and produced a child -- Horus, the Falcon-head god, and that guy grew up swearing revenge on Set.
Set ruled as Pharaoh of Egypt for a while, but when Horus was old enough he challenged Set and they had an old-school throwdown. First they had a huge series of battles, which resulted in Set pulling out one of Horus’s eyes (the Eye of Horus is that Egyptian eye hieroglyph you see all the time), and Horus ballknocked below the belt and pulled off one of Set’s nuts.
I feel at this point that I should just take a moment and mention that I am not adding all this penis-eating fish and getting punched in the balls business to pad my dick joke stats and make you guys laugh, this is really how the mythology is written.
Anyway, after a series of battles, debates, and a boat race (Horus won but he cheated, seriously), there still wasn’t a clear winner in the struggle for the throne of Egypt, so the Gods called a truce to the war and decided to vote on who should be the ruler of Earth. All of the gods picked Horus, except one -- the Sun God Ra, who couldn’t diss his long-time bodyguard and betray his friend. So, because the vote had to be unanimous, Set fucking ruled as Pharaoh for 80 damn years, which is amazing because he’s basically Ancient Egyptian Skeletor. Isis eventually tricked Set into testifying against himself through some really long convoluted parable, and Ra was kind of forced to change his mind, ousting Set and putting Horus on the throne of Egypt. Set was relegated to Lord of everything in the world that wasn’t Egypt -- the deserts, the wilderness, and the foreign lands. Weirdly, people still had lots of cults and temples to him, praying for protection against drought, invasion, conflict, and earthquakes, which is kind of awesome because it meant the Egyptians were praying to Set for protection FROM Set’s unimaginable powers.
I have a hard time believing that Falcon Guy wins this, just sayin.
By the time of Egypt’s New Kingdom Set was considered to be pretty evil, and all of the Pharaohs of Egypt claimed to be descendents of the line of the god Horus. There are two key exceptions to this, however, and they just so happen to be three of the most badass Pharaohs -- the Setis and the Ramseses all claimed Set as a patron god. Ramses II even built him a huge temple in the capital and named a military division after him, which is pretty awesome.
By the time of Egypt’s 20th dynasty though, Egypt kept getting conquered by foreigners and people started blaming Set for it, and that’s where we start getting all the demon imagery from. When the Classical Greeks started writing about him they associated him with Typhon, the lord demon of hell, and a lot of the imagery surrounding Set -- that of a red-skinned beast with a forked tail, kind of inspired a lot of Christian mythology surrounding Satan.
And, to be fair, even today, 4000 years after his first depiction, this guy still looks like he’d be pretty fucking kickass on the cover of a hardcore metal album.
