Temple of Set

The Temple of Set exists because of a disagreement about whether Satan is a metaphor.

Michael Aquino, an officer in the United States Army and a priest of the Church of Satan, left it in 1975 with a group of others. His objections were partly organisational (LaVey had abolished the local groups and was, in Aquino's account, selling priesthoods), and partly theological. Aquino held that the adversary was a real being, that the materialism of the Church of Satan led nowhere, and that the entity in question was better identified with Set, the Egyptian god of the desert, of disorder and of separateness, than with a figure out of Christian demonology.

That makes the Temple of Set theistic, which distinguishes it from both the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple, and it is why it belongs in this section rather than outside it.

Its doctrine centres on Xeper, an Egyptian word it renders as I have come into being: the deliberate development of the individual consciousness into something separate from and independent of the natural order. Set is understood as the principle of that isolate intelligence, the one thing in the universe that is not simply a part of the universe, and the practitioner's aim is to become likewise. The Temple calls this the Left-Hand Path and defines it precisely as the pursuit of separation rather than of union, which is the reverse of what most religious systems ask for.

The break was amicable in neither direction, and the Church of Satan has treated every subsequent organisation calling itself Satanist as illegitimate ever since.

The Temple of Set is a genuine initiatory order, and its structure is a deliberate correction of what Aquino thought had gone wrong in the body he left. There are six degrees, from Setian through Adept, Priest, Magister Templi, Magus and Ipsissimus. Recognition is conferred on assessment and cannot be bought, and most members never advance past the second. Local groups are called pylons. The emphasis falls heavily on reading, writing and argument, and the internal literature is substantial.

The organisation's public history is dominated by an episode that must be stated with precision, because it has been misreported in both directions for forty years.

In November 1986 an investigation began into the sexual abuse of children at a United States Army child development centre at the Presidio in San Francisco. The abuse there was real: a large majority of the children examined showed signs of it, and their parents brought a substantial damages claim. In August 1987 a three-year-old girl identified Aquino as an abuser, in a satanic ritual setting. No charges were ever brought against him. Investigators found no supporting evidence, he was documented as living in Washington at the relevant time, and the matter was closed for insufficient evidence. He was never charged, tried or convicted. He and his wife pursued those who repeated the allegation, with mixed results, and settled out of court against two books.

The accurate formulation is that he was investigated, never charged, and the case closed for want of evidence. It is neither an open allegation nor an exoneration on the merits, and the episode belongs to the history of the Satanic Panic at least as much as to the history of the Temple.

Academic estimates put the Temple of Set at between three and five hundred members, with pylons in the United States, Australia and Europe. It has never sought to be large, and an admission process requiring sustained reading and written work ensures that it will not be.

It is the most intellectually serious of the organisations treated in this section and the least visible. It does not campaign, does not court publicity, and has produced no equivalent of the Baphomet statue or the Satanic Bible; its literature is addressed to members and assumes them.

Its position relative to its neighbours is worth setting out, because the three are routinely confused. The Church of Satan is atheistic and individualist. The Satanic Temple is atheistic and activist. The Temple of Set is theistic and initiatory, and regards the other two as having settled for a symbol. All three reject the accusation that they worship the Christian devil, and the Temple of Set's rejection is the most emphatic, since it holds that identifying Set with that figure is a Christian misreading of an Egyptian god who long predates him.

On the Egyptian material the Temple is candid: it does not claim to be reconstructing the historical cult of Set, which was a state religion of an entirely different kind, and it treats the Egyptian god as the most apt available name for a principle rather than as an object of restored worship. That is a more careful position than most modern orders take about their borrowed antiquity.

Aquino died in 2019. The Temple has continued under successive High Priests, and remains what he built: a small, demanding, literate order that expects its members to write.