Set is the most misrepresented god in the Egyptian pantheon, and the misrepresentation has a date. For roughly two thousand years he was a full member of the state religion — violent, foreign-tinged, difficult, but necessary and openly honoured. Then, over the first millennium BCE, he was rewritten into something close to a devil, his images were hacked out, his name was replaced in old texts, and by the time Greek and Roman authors were writing about Egypt he had become simply the enemy. Modern retellings inherit the last chapter and present it as the whole book.
The animal nobody can identify
He is drawn as a creature with a curved downturned snout, tall squared-off ears, an erect forked tail, and a lean canine body. Zoologists and Egyptologists have proposed the aardvark, the fennec fox, the saluki, the oryx, the giraffe, the okapi, the wild ass, the jerboa and a domestic dog breed now extinct, and none of the proposals has held. The sha — the Set animal — remains unidentified, and the honest position is that it may never have been a single real species: it may be a composite built to look like nothing else, which for a god of the outside and the anomalous would be entirely fitting. The consistency of the drawing across three thousand years argues that the artists were copying a convention rather than an animal in front of them.
He also appears as a black pig, a hippopotamus, a crocodile and a donkey, all animals Egypt classed as dangerous, and all of them forms in which he is being defeated rather than honoured.
What he was actually for
His domain is the red land — deshret, the desert — as against the black floodplain, and everything the desert implies: thunderstorms, sandstorms, the routes to the mines and to Asia, and foreignness generally. Egypt was a river culture surrounded by land that could kill you, and it did not pretend otherwise. Set is that fact given a name.
His most important job, and the one popular accounts almost never mention, is on the solar barque. In the Book of the Dead and in the New Kingdom underworld books, Set stands in the prow of Ra's boat with a spear and fights Apep, the serpent of chaos who attacks the sun every night. Only Set is strong enough for the job. The theological logic is exact: the disorder inside the system is the weapon you use against the disorder outside it. In some scenes he is shown gripping the serpent while other gods hold ropes, and the caption gives him epithets of praise. There is no irony in the text.
He is also, in the Pyramid Texts, a helper of the dead king — the one whose strength lifts the king to the sky, whose limbs the king uses. The oldest Egyptian funerary corpus we have does not treat him as the enemy of the afterlife.
The murder, and how the sources differ
He kills Osiris, and everything else follows from that. But how he does it depends entirely on which source you are reading, and the difference is instructive.
The Egyptian material is allusive and never narrates the killing directly. The Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts refer to it constantly — the god who was struck down, the brother who did it, the body that was found — without ever setting the scene, because these are ritual utterances for people who already knew the story. Egyptian religion did not write its central myth down as a story.
Plutarch did. De Iside et Osiride — Greek, of about 100 CE, by a Delphic priest who had never set foot in the country — supplies the chest built to Osiris's measurements, the banquet, the trick, the sealing with molten lead, the drift to Byblos, and the dismemberment into fourteen pieces scattered across Egypt. It is the version everyone knows, it is roughly two thousand years younger than the material it describes, it is written by an outsider with a Platonising agenda, and some of its details are confirmed by Egyptian sources while others are not. This site cites it constantly and flags it every time, because it is simultaneously indispensable and untrustworthy.
The demonisation, with dates
The turn is traceable. Through the Old and Middle Kingdoms Set is a normal god with real cults, and Ombos — Nubt, near modern Naqada — is his city; his other major centre is Avaris in the eastern Delta.
The Hyksos, the Asiatic rulers of the Second Intermediate Period, adopted him as their chief god and identified him with the storm god Baal, which associated him permanently with foreign rule. Even so, the Ramesside dynasty that followed embraced him: Seti I and Seti II carry his name in their own, the god's name written in a royal cartouche, and Ramesses II's treaty with the Hittites invokes "Set of Egypt" alongside the Hittite storm god as a guarantor. The Four Hundred Year Stela from Tanis commemorates a Set festival. This is a god in good standing in the thirteenth century BCE.
By the Third Intermediate and Late Periods that has collapsed. Set figures are erased from monuments, his name is chiselled out or replaced, and rituals for his destruction proliferate — spitting on his image, trampling, cutting up wax models. In the Ptolemaic period he is fully the adversary, and Plutarch's Typhon, the identification the Greeks made with their own monstrous storm-figure, seals it. The trigger is usually explained as the trauma of foreign conquest by Assyria and Persia hardening Egyptian attitudes to the god of foreigners, which is plausible and not provable.
Nephthys, and a marriage that produces nothing
He is married to his sister Nephthys, and the pairing is barren — a deliberate symmetry against the fertile pairing of Osiris and Isis. Nephthys sides against him after the murder and mourns beside her sister; in the later genealogy she conceives Anubis by Osiris rather than by her husband. Set's own consorts in other texts include the Semitic goddesses Anat and Astarte, awarded to him by the tribunal in the Contendings as compensation for losing the throne, which is itself a marker of how foreign he had become in the Egyptian imagination.
A god who was not, and then was, evil
The reason to be careful here is not sentimentality about a maligned character. It is that "Set is the Egyptian devil" imports a Judaeo-Christian shape — a rebel who was once good and fell — that does not fit. Set never fell. He was always the same thing: force, storm, the outside, the anomaly, the strength that is dangerous and also needed. What changed was Egypt's tolerance for treating that as a legitimate part of the divine order. The genuinely un-Egyptian evil is Apep, who was never a god at all and cannot be reconciled, only repelled again the next night.
Set after Egypt: villain, antihero, and a Californian borrowing
Contemporary fiction has mostly kept the Late Period villain — the Gods of Egypt film, Moon Knight, a long run of games — and where it varies, it usually varies into a sympathetic-outsider reading that is closer to the Ramesside evidence than to Plutarch, though generally by accident. The Temple of Set, a religious body founded in California in 1975, uses the name for its own purposes and makes no claim to reconstruct Egyptian practice.
Questions this reversal raises
Is "Set" or "Seth" correct?
Both are used in serious writing. The Egyptian consonantal skeleton is swtḫ or stš, vocalised in later Egyptian as something like Sutekh; "Seth" is the Greek form and reaches English through the Septuagint and the classical authors, which unhelpfully makes it identical to the name of Adam's third son, an entirely unrelated figure. "Set" is the commoner Egyptological convention in English and is used here.
If he defends the sun, why is he also the one who attacks order?
Because Egyptian thought did not require a god to be internally consistent in the way a character in a novel must be. Function is contextual: in the barque scene the relevant fact about Set is that he is the strongest violent force available, and it is aimed outward. In the succession myth the relevant fact is that he is the illegitimate claimant, and the violence is aimed inward. The same attribute is an asset in one frame and a crime in the other.
Was there ever a priesthood of Set after the demonisation?
Isolated pockets survived, notably in the oases and at Dakhla, where a temple of Seth at Mut el-Kharab has produced material running remarkably late. Local cults persisted after the state had turned against him, which is a normal pattern in Egyptian religion — the tradition overview has more on how uneven religious change actually was across the country.