Set:
16 Budge, Egyptian Language. New York: Dover Publications, 1971,
page #15. Ions, op.cit. , pages #50-55. Fagan, op.cit. , pages #34-36.
Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, Volume V in Moralia (14 volumes), F.C.
Babbitt (Ed. & Trans.). London: Loeb Classical Library, 1936.
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(1) Together with the Priesthood of Horus [the
Elder], it was the oldest of the Egyptian
priesthoods. If we date it to the earliest predynastic
images of Set found by archæologists, we can establish an
origin of at least 3200 BCE. Working with the Egyptians’
own astronomically-based records, we may approximate
5000 BCE. 17 If we are to assume the final eclipse of the
Priesthood at the end of the XIX-XX [Setian] Dynasties
ca. 1085 BCE, we are looking at an institution which
existed at least two thousand and possibly as many as
four thousand years. “In the early dynasties,” observes
Budge:
Set was a beneficent god, and one whose favor was
sought after by the living and by the dead, and so late
as the XIX Dynasty kings delighted to call themselves
“Beloved of Set”. After the cult of Osiris was firmly
established and this god was the “great god” of all
Egypt, it became the fashion to regard Set as the origin
of all evil, and his statues and images were so
effectively destroyed that only a few which have
escaped by accident have come down to us. 18
One may note that Set was by no means the only
“fabulous” creature ever portrayed by Egyptian artists.
But he was the only one represented as a principal neter,
as opposed to a purely-animalistic monster of the Tuat.
(2) Set was the neter who was “different” from
all of the others. Too often this is simplified into his
being the “evil” slayer of Osiris, hence the personification
of “evil”; yet any but the most cursory study of Egyptian
religious symbolism is sufficient to dispel this caricature.
17 Lockyer, J. Norman, The Dawn of Astronomy. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1964, page #215.
18 Budge, The Book of the Dead, page #181.
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He was rather a neter “against the neteru”: the entity who
symbolized that which is not of nature.
This is a very curious role for a neter in Egyptian
cosmology: to be a presence and force which alone could
not be apprehended by perceptions of the natural senses.
Set thus represents the nameless “thing” whose existence
we know of by the shadow it casts on things apprehended
and things perceived by it: the non-natural “presence of
self” ( telos) in individual intelligent life.
Various post-Egyptian cultures have generalized the
vehicle by which this presence is manifest as the spirit,
psyche, or soul, but increased precision is possible. We
must subtract from such crudeness what is “life force”,
and focus our attention on that which remains: the very
awareness of self. In doing so we have in one sense
retraced the path of Descartes to the cogito ergo sum
proposition. Unlike Descartes, however, we see this
phenomenon to be a “thing totally apart” which is not an
extension of “God” or anything else. Set is the
conceptualizer of this principle: the designer. To rewrite
the crucial sentence in the above quote from the point of
view of a neter: “A thing created in the mind thereby
exists.”
This is delicate ground to tread, so much more so for
an ancient Egyptian civilization whose entire “natural”
cosmology was based upon the perfection and harmony
of the Universe.
(3) Despite this unique and disturbing image,
or perhaps because of it, Set became the patron
of the two most powerful dynasties in Egypt’s
long history, the XIX and XX. Herein there is an
interesting “theological succession”:
The early XVIII Dynasty (ca. 1580-1372) was that of
the great Amenhoteps, during whose reigns the
Priesthood of Amon at Thebes was preeminent. The
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dynasty disintegrated during the “Amarna period” (ca.
1372-1343) of Akhenaten, during which the solar disk of
Aton was considered supreme if not indeed all-inclusive
of the neteru. When the new XIX Dynasty arose under
Rameses I and Seti I, the state role of Amon was restored
- but the pharaohs directed much of their efforts towards
Set. Recounts Sauneron:
The new dynasty in power, careful to appear to be
“restoring everything to order”, had many reasons for
mistrusting the Amonian priesthood. Descendants of a
military family of the eastern delta, the new pharaohs
were traditionally devoted to a god little esteemed by
the masses because of the role that he had been
assigned in the death of Osiris. But they preserved
nevertheless, here and there, the temples and
priesthoods of the god Set.
The Amarnian experience had demonstrated the
cost of too abrupt a break with the beliefs central to the
entire nation, and of entering into open warfare against
a priesthood practically as powerful as the throne itself.
Thus the politics of Seti I (1312-1301) and of Rameses II
(1301-1235) were infinitely more subtle than those of
their predecessors. There was no rupture with Thebes;
the constructions continued, and magnificent edifices
were raised to the glory of Amon at Karnak, Gourna,
and Ramesseum. But it was from the [Osirian] center
of Abydos that Rameses appointed the High Priest of
Amon. Then he installed two of his sons, Merytum and
Khamuast, as the High Priests of Ra at Heliopolis and
Ptah at Memphis, and demonstrated by further
monuments and political favors his public support of
these gods. But finally, wearied of Thebes and its
ambitious priests, he departed to build a new capital,
Pi-Rameses, in the eastern delta - where he could
quietly worship the god dearest to him, with Amon
occupying a secondary prominence.
The provincial cities where Set had been
worshipped from all eternity - among them Ombos,
Tjebu, and Sepermeru - gained new preeminence from
the favor accorded by the Ramesside leaders to the god
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of the Eastern Delta. Above all, Pi-Rameses, the new
capital, brilliantly restored the worship that Set had
formerly received in the Avaris of the Hyksos. 19
During the Setian Dynasties - most probably during
the reign of Merenptah - the revolt and “exodus” of a
number of nomads (hieroglyphic habiru) living in Egypt’s
Goshen province occurred - or at least did so in Jewish
legend. Although “Old Testament” lore states that the
original Hebrews were a unified, foreign culture which
entered Egypt during the time of Rameses I, there are no
Egyptian records substantiating this. It is more probable
that the actual participants in any “exodus” were people
fro
m a variety of ethnic backgrounds. 20 Possibly the
Hebrews’ hated “Satan” derives from one of the honorific
titles ( Set-hen = Eternal Set) accorded the state deity of
the regime they were fleeing.
Following the passing of the two Setian dynasties, the
increasing influence of a priesthood not courted by the
19 Ibid., pages #183-184.
20 Romer, John, Testament. New York: Henry Holt, 1988, page #58:
“Hard evidence of the Exodus event in the preserving deserts of the
Sinai, where most of the biblical Wandering takes place, is similarly
elusive. Although its climate has preserved the tiniest traces of
ancient bedouin encampments and the sparse, 5,000-year-old
villages of mine-workers, there is not a single trace of Moses or the
Israelites. And they would have been by far the largest body of
ancient people ever to have lived in this great wilderness. Neither is
there any evidence that Sinai and its little natural springs could ever
have supported such a multitude, even for a single week. Several
19th-century vicars recognized this fact within a day or two of the
start of numerous expeditions in search of Moses’ footsteps.
“Escaping from the rigours of an English winter,” as one of them
says, “in a land of the flock and the tent to which our only guide was
the Bible” they quickly realized that the biblical Exodus was
logistically impossible and that the Bible was a most ambiguous
guide to that desolate region. The biblical description of the Exodus,
then, flies in the face of practical experience. Indeed the closer you
examine it, the further it seems removed from all of ancient history.”
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Ramesside pharaohs - that of Osiris - boded ill for the
Priesthood of Set. The Osirians recast Set as Osiris’
treacherous brother and mortal enemy of Osiris’ son - for
whom they appropriated the neter Horus. Not content
with attacking Set personally, they further appropriated
his consort and son from the original triad of his cult -
Nepthys and Anubis - whom they now described
respectively as a concubine of Osiris and a son of Osiris
by Nepthys. Comments Budge:
Between the XXII and the XXV Dynasties, a violent
reaction set in against this god [Set]; his statues and
figures were smashed; his effigy was hammered out
from the bas-reliefs and stelæ in which it appeared. 21
Various reasons for this reaction have been proposed
by Egyptologists. It is been suggested that Set fell into
disrepute through being associated in the popular mind
with the Sutekh of the invading Hyksos. Possible, but
improbable, as the Hyksos invasion occurred prior to the
XIX-XX Dynasties when Set was preeminently in favor -
and the presiding neter over Egypt’s greatest period of
imperial glory.
Set’s eclipse may well have been due to a more subtle,
yet pervasive sentiment sweeping Egypt. As Sauneron
and many other Egyptologists have acknowledged,
Egyptian philosophy was based upon a millennia-old
conviction of the absolute presence and influence of the
neteru, and in the virtue of a social system in which the
preservation of cyclical harmony was all-important.
While the New Empire of the XIX-XX Dynasties extended
Egypt’s influence to Palestine and Mesopotamia, it also
made the Egyptians aware that there were many other
functioning cultures in which the neteru were unknown
21 Budge, The Mummy. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1973,
page #276.
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[at least by their Egyptian names]. Moreover the concept
of Egypt as just one among a number of nation-states
competing for power and influence in the Mediterranean,
rather than as the one civilization at the center of
existence, must have been a most unsettling one to this
ancient culture - which previously had been able to
discount its neighbors as mere uncultured, barbarian
tribes.
Egypt’s solution to this problem was to turn gradually
away from a glorification of this life and towards an
orientation on the afterlife, where such disturbing
dilemmas could be assumed not to exist. This would
explain the growing influence and popularity of the Osiris
cult during the post-XX Dynasty Egyptian decadence;
Osiris was an afterlife neter.
As the Osiris cult portrayed Set as Osiris’ nemesis
rather than an independent and preexisting neter with no
particular interest in Osiris, this would also explain the
simultaneous wave of Setian persecution described by
Budge. It was characteristic of ancient Egypt that each
new dynasty, in an attempt to establish its own
“timelessness”, often doctored monuments and records to
eliminate inconvenient inconsistencies. Presumably the
Osirian dynasties followed suit, defacing or rewriting all
references to Set that did not support their portrayal of
him as a “Devil”. 22 And that was the distortion of Set
which survived in later Mediterranean legend -
principally through Plutarch, who described it in some
detail in his Moralia. 23
The greatest breakthrough for modern scholars of
Egyptian metaphysics came with the writings of René
22 Ions, op.cit. , pages #72-78. The Osirian legends on this subject are
treated comprehensively in J. Gwyn Griffith’s The Conflict of Horus
and Seth (Chicago: Argonaut Publishers, 1969).
23 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, Volume V in Moralia.
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Schwaller de Lubicz and his wife Isha. Indeed much
credit is due her, because much of René’s work is highly
technical. Isha synthesized its elemental themes into her
highly-readable “novel” Her-Bak, a young Egyptian’s
journey from ordinary peasant to initiated priest. 24
René’s initial realization came from his study of
hieroglyphs: that in addition to their convenience for
mere alphabetics, they embodied symbolic principles
apprehensible to both the rational and the suprarational
intelligence. [His methodology is thus often termed
“Symbolism”.] Gradually he extended his awareness of
this key to Egyptian culture into its architecture (as in his
magnum opus examination of the Luxor temple complex,
Le Temple de L’Homme) and pre-Pythagoreanism.
Of the various secondary works examining René’s
ideas, John Anthony West’s Serpent in the Sky is the
most “immediately-intelligible” introduction. 25 Another
very capable presentation is Egyptian Mysteries by Lucie
Lamy, René’s longtime student and the talented
illustrator for both his works and Isha’s. 26
In the original 1994 Stargate motion picture, the
Great Pyramid of Giza was revealed to be nothing more
than a crude, ritualistic imitation by fearful protodynastic
Egyptians of the gigantic, pyramidal starships in which
creatures beyond their comprehension had come to
Earth; the stone coffer in the “King’s Chamber” was a
similar rough image of the wondrous machine in the
starships with the power to literally bring dead bodies
back to life.
24 Schwaller de Lubicz, Isha, Her-Bak. New York: Inner Traditions,
1954 (two volumes).
25 West, Anthony, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient
Egypt. New York: Julian Press, Inc., 1987.
26 Lamy, Lucie, Egyptian Mysteries. New York: Crossroad, 1981.
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In that film, as well as the elegant television series it
subsequently inspired, the alien “gods” were not quite the
neteru they pretended to be - simply an advanced species
using “divine” imagery as a means of psychological
domination of others as well as for their own exotic
pleasures. Nevertheless these Goa’uld almost uncannily
demonstrated the relationship which ordinary humanity
has with its perceived “God/gods” - and why it is quite
fulfilled by such a relationship, false and oppressive as it
may be.
In world after world, civilization after civilization, it is
ever the same; and when a Goa’uld is exposed or killed,
the result is always chaos and uncertainty, with the
“liberated” peoples slipping down into aimless, tedious
tribalism. The wanton terrors of the Goa’uld are gone -
but so are the great, gleaming Pyramidal starships, the
technology to instantly heal all injuries and even restore
bodily life itself, and the ecstatic experience of interacting
with the “gods” face-to-face.
Stargate leaves its audience with an even more
tantalizing mystery. If the Goa’uld borrow their personæ
from real neteru whom they have used technology to
imitate, how did they originally come to know them?
Which leads to my central question about the
ancient Egyptians: Why didn’t their culture “develop”?
The evidence shows that their arts, sciences,
mathematics, technology, techniques of warfare are all
there complete from the beginning. What I want to
argue here today is that the Egyptians of the pre-Old
Kingdom era somehow “inherited” all these arts and
sciences. Then after a short “getting acquainted”
period, we see the full flowering of what we call ancient
Egypt ...
Lecture, Daniel Jackson, Ph.D.
Scottish Rite Temple
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