Seth

Seth is the Egyptian god of the desert, storms and violence, the brother and murderer of Osiris and the defender of Ra's boat against Apophis. Feared and revered at once, he is the red lord of all beyond the ordered world, the necessary violence that guards creation even as it threatens it.

Son of Geb and Nut and husband of Nephthys, Seth belongs to the Ennead of Heliopolis. Envious of his brother, he killed Osiris: the Pyramid Texts already allude to the murder, and Plutarch tells how Seth trapped him in a chest, then tore the body apart and scattered it across Egypt. He then fought Osiris' son Horus for the throne in a long, brutal war that cost Horus an eye and Seth his testicles. The Contendings of Horus and Seth, a papyrus from about 1150 BC, turns it into an eighty-year trial before the gods, full of tricks, boat races and hippopotamus fights; the throne goes to Horus, and Ra takes Seth into the sky to thunder.

Yet Seth is no mere villain. Each night he stands at the prow of Ra's solar boat and drives his spear into the chaos serpent Apophis so that the sun can rise again: in the Contendings he boasts that no other god can do it, and in the Book of the Dead his iron lance makes the serpent disgorge what it swallowed. He was a royal god from the earliest times, worshipped at Nubt in Upper Egypt, and the Second Dynasty king Peribsen set the Seth animal above his royal name in place of Horus' falcon.

The Hyksos rulers of the Delta adopted him as their chief god, and the Ramesside kings, from the same region, honored him: Seti I bears his name, and Ramesses II set up a stela celebrating four hundred years of his cult. In the first millennium BC, under foreign rule, Seth became the god of invaders and of evil; his images were defaced and the Greeks identified him with Typhon, though the oases of the Western Desert worshipped him as their lord into Roman times.