Why Set?
November 3, 2007

In one of the many discussion forums I frequent, I was asked, "Why Set? What attracted you to Him? And is "Set" actually His Egyptian name?" Name clarification first: "Many different forms of the name of Seth occur in the Egyptian texts...." "Just as the way of writing is not uniform but has variants, the pronunciation will also have been different according to time and place.The harder Lower-Egyptian pronunciation may have been Sutekh evolved to Setekh; the Upper-Egyptian pronunciation may have been Sut, evolved to Set. The h in the modern rendering of the name Seth might be reminiscent of the Coptic 'q'. It seems practical to maintain in this book the long established rendering that follows the Greek: Seth." -Te Velde, _Seth, God of Confusion_, pages 1, 2-) As I can't find special html characters for certain characters in his text, I have actual book excerpts, page one and pages two and three. (Now for my personal tale...) In 2003, I was full of curiousity about so many things, and I gave Google a good work out each day, day after day, searching, trying different wordings of search strands. Some how I ended up at xeper.org, website of the Temple of Set. So I was there wandering the blue backgrounded pages of those 'black' magicians, reading of Set, and I thought, "HE's the One I sensed so many years ago, in my epiphany under the stars!" Back when I was nineteen (1978), and much absorbed with Ayn Rand's atheistic philosophy, I thought the world all ordered by reason. But then under the stars, on a late July night, oh, I'm sure it was summer, I looked up at all the sparkling diamond stars and I felt that a Great Power had gone into their making. I knew the Power to be electrical in nature and that we could plug into it(him). Well, that's all the further I knew. I'd read here and there of deities, but none seemed to match what I felt that night. Until I read of Set, the Egyptian God, 'Great of Strength', who does not keep to borders, and I felt "Yes!" That's the one, that's the one with the strength to make stars. Yes, he's chaotic and dangerous and the Egyptians feared him. But he's the one, 'cause Power, by its very nature is dangerous and must be channeled. It can't be 'orderly'. It has its own pulse, its own direction, that which brings worlds into being. Experience has layered upon experience. I think maybe he borrows the face of Shiva for a while, maybe Odin, oh...maybe. But the one view of All That Power, All that Chaos, All that Drive, all that jolts us into awareness like an electric shock, that to me is best represented by the Egyptian Set. And I like his pantheon mates,too. (I will add this to my "Who is the Dark Lord" piece and eventually rewrite the whole piece, instead of it being a conglomeration of various writings through out the years.)

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