Who is Set (Seth), the Egyptian god of storms and the desert?

Set, also spelled Seth, was the ancient Egyptian god of the desert, storms, disorder and foreign lands. In the best-known myth he murders his brother Osiris, then fights Osiris’s son Horus for the throne of Egypt, and Horus wins. Yet Set was not simply evil. A god of great strength, he rode at the front of the sun god’s boat and speared Apep, the serpent of chaos, and kings were named after him.

Who he was in Egypt: Set was a son of the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb, a brother of Osiris and Isis, and the husband of Nephthys. He was lord of the Red Land, the desert around the black soil of the Nile valley, and also the god of foreigners and foreign lands. He was worshipped at Nubt, near Naqada in the south, and at Avaris in the eastern Delta. Seti I, father of Ramesses II, bore his name: Seti means “he of Set”.
His signs and animals: Set is shown as a strange animal, or as a man with its head: a long curved snout and tall ears squared off at the top, and on the animal a stiff, forked tail. No one has matched it for certain with a real creature. The donkey, the pig and the hippopotamus were linked with him too, and red, the colour of the desert, was his colour. Temple walls at Edfu show Horus spearing him as a hippopotamus.
How Gerald Massey read him in 1907: Massey spells the name Sut, and sometimes Sut-Typhon (Greek writers called Set Typhon). He reads Sut and Horus as twins born of one mother: darkness and light, drought and water, the dark and bright halves of the month. Their war, for him, began as a picture of nature, and Sut became the evil one only later. Massey traces Satan back to Sut, and the red-haired Judas of the old miracle plays too.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists agree that Set was not always the villain. He was honoured for most of Egyptian history. He became the great enemy, his figure chiselled off some monuments, mainly in the later periods, after foreign conquests had linked the god of foreigners with Egypt’s oppressors. Massey, too, argued that Set’s evil character came late. The Egyptians did link the eye of Horus, damaged by Set and made whole again, with the waning and waxing moon. But Massey’s reading of the two gods themselves as the dark and bright halves of the month, or as stars, is his own scheme and is not accepted. Scholars derive neither Satan, a Hebrew word meaning “adversary”, nor Judas from Set.
In Massey’s words: “The contention betwixt Sut and Horus had originated ages before the satanic character of the Evil One in his anthropomorphic guise had been assigned to Sut.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book VI, p. 326)
In the app: Trainer › Word Trainer. In the app, the Word Trainer sets Massey’s Sut and Sut-Typhon beside Set, and the Symbol Trainer explains the Eye of Horus, lost in the fight with Set.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

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