Set (also Seth, Sutekh, or Egyptian Swtḫ) is the most complex and controversial god of ancient Egypt. He is the murderer of his brother Osiris, the enemy of Horus, the lord of the barren desert, of storms and violence, of foreigners and disorder. He was associated with everything the Egyptians feared. Yet he was also a mighty protector, who stood at the prow of the sun god’s boat every night and speared the chaos serpent Apophis. For long periods he was honoured by kings; two pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty were named after him. Only in the last millennium of Egyptian history did he become a true devil, hated and cursed.
Set shows how Egyptian religion understood the world: not as a simple war between good and evil, but as a balance between order and chaos, in which even the forces of violence had their place.
The Set Animal
Set is usually shown as a man with the head of a strange animal, or as the animal itself. The Set animal (sometimes called the sha) has a long, curved snout, tall squared-off ears, and a stiff, forked tail that sticks straight up. It looks like no known creature. Egyptologists have compared it to the aardvark, the jackal, the donkey, the okapi, the greyhound, and the giraffe, but no identification has been accepted. It may be a composite or purely mythical animal.
Set was also associated with other animals seen as dangerous or unclean: the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the pig, the donkey, and the scorpion.
Family
Set was one of the gods of the Ennead of Heliopolis, the nine gods of creation. He was the son of Geb (the earth) and Nut (the sky), and his siblings were Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys. Plutarch recorded a tradition that Set did not wait for his proper birth but tore his way out through his mother’s side.
He was married to his sister Nephthys, but the marriage was childless; Nephthys bore Anubis, according to some stories, to Osiris. Set was also associated with the foreign goddesses Anat and Astarte, from Syria and Canaan.
The Red God
Set was the lord of the Red Land (deshret) — the desert that surrounded the fertile Black Land (kemet) of the Nile valley. The desert was a place of death, heat, wild animals, and nomadic raiders. Set was also a god of storms, especially the violent sandstorms, and of thunder.
Red was his colour. Red-haired people and red animals were associated with him, and in some periods red cattle were sacrificed to him. His name was sometimes written with a red hieroglyph.
The Murder of Osiris
Set’s most infamous deed is the murder of his brother Osiris, the good king of Egypt. According to the account of the Greek writer Plutarch (first century CE), Set made a beautiful chest exactly the size of Osiris’s body and, at a banquet, offered it to anyone who fitted inside. When Osiris lay down in it, Set and his conspirators slammed the lid shut, sealed it with lead, and threw it into the Nile.
Isis recovered the body, but Set found it and cut it into fourteen pieces, which he scattered across Egypt. Isis searched for the pieces and restored her husband. (See Isis and Osiris.) Egyptian sources rarely describe the murder directly — perhaps because putting it into words risked making it happen again — but they allude to it constantly.
The War with Horus
Osiris’s son Horus grew up and challenged Set for the throne. The struggle was long and bitter. Set tore out Horus’s eye; Horus castrated Set or tore off his testicles. The gods eventually judged in favour of Horus, and he became king (see The Contendings of Horus and Set).
Protector of Ra
Despite his crimes, Set had an essential role in the cosmos. Every night the sun god Ra sailed through the underworld in his boat, and every night the giant serpent Apophis, the embodiment of chaos, attacked him and tried to swallow the sun. Set, standing at the prow of the sun boat, speared the serpent and drove it back. Only Set was strong enough and fierce enough to face Apophis (see Apophis: The Serpent of Chaos).
The ambiguity is essential. Set’s violence, which made him a murderer, also made him the gods’ greatest champion. Chaos could be fought only with some of its own force.
Set and Kingship
The pharaoh was “the Horus,” but in early periods he could also be linked with Set. Kings were described as embodying “the Two Lords,” Horus and Set, representing the unification of the land. Queens of the First Dynasty bore titles like “she who sees Horus and Set.”
One king of the Second Dynasty, Peribsen (c. 2700 BCE), replaced the Horus falcon on top of his royal name with the Set animal — a unique and puzzling act that may reflect political or religious conflict. His successor Khasekhemwy placed both Horus and Set on his serekh, perhaps as a sign of reconciliation.
The Hyksos and the Ramessides
In the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1650–1550 BCE), the Hyksos, rulers of foreign (Levantine) origin who controlled northern Egypt from their capital Avaris in the Delta, adopted Set as their chief god, identifying him with the Canaanite storm god Baal.
Later, the kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty came from the same region, and they honoured Set as their family god. Seti I (c. 1290–1279 BCE), father of Ramesses the Great, was named “man of Set.” Ramesses II built a temple to Set at his capital, Pi-Ramesses, and named one of the four divisions of his army after him. A famous stele, the Four Hundred Year Stele, commemorated four hundred years of Set’s cult at Avaris.
The Demonization of Set
After the end of the New Kingdom, and especially from the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty onward (c. 750 BCE), Set’s reputation declined sharply. He became associated with the foreign invaders — Assyrians, Persians — who conquered Egypt. His images were defaced, his name was erased from monuments, and he came to be seen as purely evil, the enemy of the gods. In the temple of Edfu, the annual festival re-enacted Horus’s destruction of Set in the form of a hippopotamus.
The Greeks identified Set with Typhon, the monstrous enemy of Zeus.
Set in Modern Culture
Set appears in many modern works as a villain, from Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories (as “Set, the Old Serpent”) to films like Gods of Egypt (2016) and the Marvel series Moon Knight. Some modern occult groups, notably the Temple of Set (founded 1975), honour him as a symbol of individual will and self-deification. Egyptologists, meanwhile, have increasingly emphasized his complex and ambivalent nature in Egyptian religion itself: the dangerous, necessary god without whom the world could not be defended.
Last reviewed: September 2026.