A God Whose Reputation Changed with Egypt's Politics

Set was not always the villain of Egyptian religion. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms he was a legitimate and in places genuinely honoured god, associated with the desert, storms, and foreign lands, and paired with Horus in royal titulary and temple imagery as a symbol of the two halves of Egypt united under one king rather than as a defeated enemy. His decline into the murderer of Osiris and permanent opponent of Horus that most people now know hardened considerably later, and it hardened for reasons historians connect directly to politics rather than pure theology.

During periods when Egypt was ruled or threatened by outsiders, notably during and after Hyksos rule and later under Persian and Greek domination, Set's long association with foreign lands made him a convenient symbol for foreign invasion and disorder, and his cult and imagery suffered accordingly, with some monuments showing his images deliberately defaced in later periods. Reading Set's mythology as a single fixed story of cosmic evil misses this, since the Egyptian sources span roughly three thousand years and show a god whose moral standing moved with the political fortunes and anxieties of the civilization that worshipped him, from valued protector to scapegoat, rather than a villain fixed in place from the beginning.