Imaginary interview with Set
by Charactorium · Set · Mythology · Spirituality · Culture · 7 min read
The sand wind rose at dusk, somewhere between Ombos and the red dunes bordering the Nile. Where the Black Land gives way to the Red Land, a figure with a strange head—long upright ears and a curved snout—stands facing the sunset. Set has agreed to speak, at the uncertain hour when the sun is about to plunge into the underworld.
—How would you describe your territory, this desert that men fear?
Look around you: this is the deshret, the Red Land, my domain since before the Two Lands were bound together. Men call their lush valley Kemet, the Black Land, and they tremble when my sandstorms rise on the horizon. They are right to tremble. But I am also invoked at Ombos, my holy city, where my priests have kept my fire burning since predynastic times, long before the first pharaoh wore the double crown. I am called Nubti, he of Ombos. The desert is not a void, little interlocutor: it is a force, burning and pure, and I am that force. Those who cross my expanses with caravans offer me prayers, for they know that my mercy is better than my breath.
The desert is not a void: it is a force, burning and pure, and I am that force.
—Men depict you with a beast that no one recognizes. What does this animal that serves as your emblem mean?
Search all the herds of Kemet, in the reeds of the river and the caves of the desert: you will find nowhere the beast whose head I bear. Erect ears, cut straight like blades, curved snout, forked tail—no living creature resembles me, and that is right. I belong to no known species, just as chaos belongs to no order. When my priests sculpt me holding the was scepter, whose handle reproduces my own head, they tell the world that I dominate what has neither name nor form. The other gods have faces of falcon, jackal, ibis, borrowed from the living. I alone wear the mask of the unfindable. That is my sign, my secret, and the vertigo I leave in the eyes of those who behold me.
The other gods wear faces borrowed from the living. I alone wear the mask of the unfindable.
—Let us speak of your brother. How did you come to set this trap against Osiris?
Osiris reigned, and his glory filled the valley like the flood fills the fields. I was seen only in the storms. So I took his measurements—exactly his. I had a magnificent chest made, fitted to his body to the finger, inlaid and perfumed, and I brought it to the banquet as a game. 'To whoever lies in it perfectly, this chest shall belong.' Each one lay down, and each floated inside. Then came my brother. He stretched out in it, and the wood embraced his flesh like a garment. I slammed the lid shut. I poured molten lead over the seams, I sealed it, and I threw it all into the Nile. They will call it a betrayal. I will call it the desert's cunning against the valley's pride: the first act of a very long story.
It was not a betrayal, but the desert's cunning against the valley's pride.
—It is said that afterward you did not leave the body at rest. What happened?
Isis, my sister, never gives up. She found the chest, washed ashore far away, and hid the body in the delta marshes. But the desert has eyes everywhere. One night while hunting, I came upon the corpse, and there I finished my work: I cut Osiris into fourteen pieces, which I scattered from one end of Egypt to the other, to the four winds, so that no magic could reassemble him. Isis and Nephthys traveled every province, gathering the fragments one by one. They found all the parts—except one, the phallus, which a river fish had swallowed. That is why my brother, even resurrected, no longer rules the living but the dead, in the underworld. I made him a king of shadows.
—Then came the son of Osiris. How did you experience that endless trial before the gods?
Eighty years. That is how long the affair lasted, before the Great Ennead assembled at Heliopolis, under the presidency of Ra himself. Horus, the child grown up, claimed his father's throne by blood. And I claimed it by force: who else stands each night against the serpent? Who else guards the sun barque? A mere boy could not hold a kingdom. We pleaded, again and again, and the nine gods hesitated, leaning now to one side, now to the other. They weighed our words like grain. I saw Ra himself incline toward me, for he knew my arm. A trial is not a fair battle: it is a slower storm, where one exhausts oneself in words instead of blood.
A trial is a slower storm, where one exhausts oneself in words instead of blood.
—You fought Horus in many forms, it is said. How did this rivalry finally come to an end?
We measured ourselves in a thousand ways, my nephew and I: as men, as hippopotami diving in the river, in contests of cunning and strength. Each time I thought I would win, each time the tribunal postponed its verdict. It was not my arms that defeated me—no god could have—but Thoth, the master of words and numbers, who finally ruled in favor of filiation. The son's legitimacy prevailed over the uncle's strength. Then I was bound, arms tied behind my back, and Horus received the throne of the living. But hear this: the desert does not stay bound for long. I was not destroyed; I was assigned another task, higher still than kingship. Ra needed my arm elsewhere.
—That higher task, precisely—what do you do when night falls on the solar barque?
When the sun sinks into the Duat, the underworld, everything I lost in the tribunal returns to me in another form. I mount the prow of Ra's barque, spear in hand, and I wait. He always comes: Apophis, the immense serpent, the absolute isfet, the chaos that wants to swallow the light and prevent the dawn. No other god has the strength to look him in the face. The falcons turn away, the wise calculate—I strike. Night after night I pierce his coils, I push back his breath, and the outcome is never certain in advance. Every morning the disk rises over the horizon, it is my victory that men salute without knowing. The god they accuse of disorder is the one who, in the dark, holds absolute disorder at the point of his spear.
The god they accuse of disorder is the one who holds absolute disorder at the point of his spear.
—So there is a contradiction in you: the murderer of Osiris and the savior of Ra. How do you bear this dual nature?
You speak of contradiction; I speak of balance. Ma'at, the order of the world, does not hold because chaos has disappeared—it never disappears—but because a force keeps it in check. It takes chaos to fight chaos. I carried isfet in my hands when I drowned my brother; I carry absolute isfet on my spear when I kill Apophis on the barque of millions of years. The sandstorms that frighten caravans are the same breaths that, in the Duat, sweep away the enemies of light. A well-groomed god, all sweetness, would never have saved you from the serpent. It took someone who knows the depths of darkness to push it back. That someone is me. That is why my priests do not ask me to be gentle—only that I stay at the prow.
It takes chaos to fight chaos.
—Yet some pharaohs made you their protector. Do you remember the favor of the house of Ramesses?
Ah, the 19th Dynasty! Those were kings who were not ashamed of me. The father was named Seti—'man of Set'—my name borne like a banner on a sovereign's brow. His son Ramesses had hymns to my glory engraved near Avaris, in his new capital Pi-Ramesses, and celebrated me as god of victory, he who gives strength to the fighting arm. In those days, I was not seen as the accursed of the delta, but as the thunder that protects the royal family and bends Egypt's enemies. The storm god and the warrior pharaoh understood each other: both know that power is won in the clash, not in whispered prayers. Those were my finest years under the sun of the living.
The storm god and the warrior pharaoh understood each other: power is won in the clash.
—How do you explain that foreigners, the Hyksos, chose you among all the gods of Egypt?
The Hyksos, those lords from the east, settled in the delta and sought a god like themselves. They found me, and confused me with their own master of storms, Baal, the storm god of Canaan. That did not displease me: thunder speaks the same language under all skies. They made Avaris my city, my fortress, my throne in the delta. Later, when Ahmose drove them out and opened the era of the great pharaohs, my name kept that scent of foreignness, that perfume of storm from elsewhere. Some resented me for it. But what does the border matter to the god of the desert? Sands know no treaties. I was the god of Egypt's kings and the god of their conquerors, and I ruled over Avaris before and after.
—One day, it is said, your statues will be hammered and your name erased. What do you reply to those who would reduce you to absolute evil?
I know a time will come when they scratch my face from temple walls, when they break the Set animal wherever it appears, when they whisper my name as a curse. Distant travelers, those from the Greek sea, will call me Typhon, the monster crushed under mountains, and think thus to kill me a second time. Let them try. You cannot hammer a storm, you cannot bind the desert. As long as there is a dawn at the end of night, my spear will have struck Apophis in the darkness so that the world may continue. They can erase my name from stones; they will not erase it from the sand wind nor from the silence of the Red Land. I am ambivalence made god: neither entirely evil, nor ever at rest. And that, no generation will erase.
You cannot hammer a storm, you cannot bind the desert.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Set's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.