Set

Set (or Seth) is the Egyptian god of storms, the desert, violence, and disorder — the turbulent power at the edges of the ordered world. In the central Egyptian myth he murders his brother Osiris out of envy, dismembers his body, and seizes the throne, only to be challenged and at last defeated by Osiris's son Horus.

Yet Set is not simply an evil to be abolished: he also stands in the prow of the sun-god's barque, beating back the serpent of chaos each night, the necessary force that fights disorder with disorder. The Greeks identified him with their monstrous Typhon, the enemy of the gods, and Plutarch, reading the myth in Platonic terms, made Set the principle of irrational, disruptive matter and disorder — the resistance that the rational order of Osiris must forever overcome, much as the Demiurge must master the errant motion of the receptacle.