Set is among the most instructive of Egyptian gods because his moral valence changed dramatically over three thousand years. God of storms, the desert, foreign lands, and violent disorder, he is the murderer of his brother Osiris in the central Egyptian myth, dismembering the body, seizing the throne, and warring against Osiris's son Horus for the kingship, a conflict resolved in Horus's favour and read as the triumph of ordered rule over usurpation. Yet Set was not simply a devil.
For long stretches of Egyptian history he was a respected and even royal god: kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty (Seti, "man of Set") bore his name, and above all he was the indispensable defender of the sun god Ra, standing at the prow of the solar barque each night to spear the chaos-serpent Apophis, the one god violent enough to protect the cosmos from a greater chaos. Only in the later periods, and especially under foreign domination, was he progressively demonized and identified with Egypt's enemies. Set embodies a sophisticated theological intuition: that disorder and violent force are not simply to be abolished, but are a real and sometimes necessary power within the world, dangerous and useful by turns.