Xeper

The word is an ancient Egyptian verb meaning to come into being, to become, to be transformed. In the hieroglyphic script it is written with the beetle sign, and the same root gives the name of the god Khepri, the form of the sun associated with the morning and with self-generation. The Temple of Set transliterates it Xeper and pronounces it in its own way, and treats the first person form, I have come into being, as the whole of the teaching in three words.

The word entered the Temple through its founding document, the Book of Coming Forth by Night, which Michael Aquino set down in 1975 and presented as received rather than composed. The Temple regards it as the word of its aeon, in the sense that a magical current is held to be summed up in a single term that states what the period is for.

What is claimed for it is a specific reading of the grammar. Because the verb is in a completed form, the statement is not an aspiration but a report: the speaker has already begun, and the becoming is something being done rather than something awaited. The Temple insists that this makes Xeper a process and not a state, so there is no point at which a person has finished. That reading is the doctrinal foundation of everything else the Temple teaches, and it is presented as a practice rather than as a proposition about the universe.

The practical content of the teaching is that the work is not transferable. A Setian is expected to define their own course of study and practice, and the Temple degree structure recognises attainment that a member has demonstrated rather than conferring a status that then produces it. Initiation on this account is something a person does, and the organisation exists to provide material, criticism and company for it.

That emphasis explains the shape of the group. It has remained deliberately small and reading-heavy, organised into orders and local pylons, with a substantial recommended bibliography and an expectation that members will write. The individualism is doctrinal rather than merely cultural: if awareness developing itself is the point of existence, then a member who defers to an authority has stopped doing the thing.

The Temple was founded in 1975 by members who left the Church of Satan, and the difference between the two bodies is instructive. The Church of Satan, under Anton LaVey, treated Satan as a symbol of human nature and its rituals as psychodrama. The Temple of Set holds that Set is a genuinely existing intelligence, distinct from the natural order, and that the isolate consciousness of a human being is likewise something the universe did not produce by itself. Xeper is what that consciousness does with itself, and the Temple presents it as the reason the Temple exists at all.