Kemet Online: Followers of The Religion of Ancient Egypt: Set's bad name

Set is the first netjer who identified Himself to me; the first thing He said to me was, "When are you going to dye your damn hair again, huh?" (I took up hennaing my hair intermittently in 2000; now that I'm Kemetic, I dye my hair red as offering for Set. Most recently in a major rite in which I offered the henna before applying it.)

He is always moving when I see Him, except for long moments that are that much powerful because the motion is contained perfectly within the perfect stillness. I have always gone out in thunderstorms when I could, feeling the energies, feeling myself revitalised by the storm.

Seth Beyond the Borders of Egypt

There is no river here
Nor flood to bring the black and green
And birth the land anew.
So he comes rumbling
To bring about his brother's blessing
To fling Osiris to the earth
All in pieces
And to drive the people to take cover
With rain and thunder
Rather than sand.

I am not myself without Him -- His strength is a thing curled up in my soul, rich and red and luminous. I recently went through a period where I could not find Him, and thus could not find myself; I prepared to do rite to make Him offerings in the hopes that He would return to me, with no faith that I could find him. I decided what I was going to do, and He came to me -- I wrote in my journal:

His forearms are massive, and prickle with heat. I have thin, frail arms, especially by comparison to that bulk; the weight of His arms is amazing. I feel the grit of the sand against the soles of my feet, the sand and that same burning heat that comes with the weight of those arms. His ears are held stiffly upright, and I can feel against the side of my head and my temple the thick skin-warmed band of the gold ring piercing the left one, a ring that I believe in remembering must be larger than the palm of my hand -- the size of my hand with fingers out to the first joint, as I crook my hand into a claw, and as thick around as two of my fingers.

And I was whole again, after. I made the offerings I had resolved to make to seek for Him in thanks, instead, as soon as I had everything I needed and an evening I could devote. (And -damn-, was the meal I made for Him good!)

A long time ago, I had a head full of isfet, turmoil and self-destruction. And He appeared to me in a flickering image that lasted only an instant, but was so . . . massively . . . with the cognitive dissonance that it hurt, badly, hurt and I had to laugh with it. He broke my head, and He drained all the isfet out.

At PantheaCon this year, I joined a drum circle, and afterwards found someone I knew to be primarily devoted to Set and asked him how much resonance he found between Set and the drum. (The fellow played for Him.) This is what I wrote about the drum circle, in part:

They dance, in the center of the circle, a third of them stripped at least to the waist; narrow-waisted, overflowing-waisted, hips like a camel, inked and smooth and furred, masked and unmasked, wound up in scarves and ripples and swirling past with the sudden breath of the dancers, lungfuls of moving air a sudden shock in amongst the sweat and driving demands of the rhythm. Here lies Ma'at at Her most primal, that driving pulse that shapes everything as far as it can be heard, each individual drum,each individual bell, each chime and tambour on its own course, all dancing with Ma'at, dancing with Setekh in the violence and the passion of the beat. They writhe, arms twisting, down on their knees, pressed up together, alone, all beautiful -- a full kiss from a bare stranger into the rhythm and out and back into the dance and gone again, familiar and unfamiliar, wild, constrained, boneless or not, the pounding of hands against the instruments that sway with the player's hips, the motions of hips and joints and bare skin glistening (his arms move, pushing him upwards, thrusting higher; she sways, the tattoos swirling down her lower spine into her skirts only accentuating the slither of her hips); in the eye of the dancers a singlefigure, straightly curved, rests on head and elbows, upside down, perfectly vertical, perfectly still, the maypole for the revels. To one side, someone with glowing chains enacts what looks for all the world like a weapons form, glittering in the rhythms, choosing to enact blood rather than sex to the drive of the beat.

He is in many ways alone, the one who minds the edges, the red lands, so that those who live in the black lands are not stalked by the things that He hunts. There is a loneliness to Him at times; there is a loneliness to everyone who is by nature Individual before Community. And He and Herw-Wr both place the crowns upon the head of the king, that the king may know both the strength that comes of the individual and the strength that comes from community. It is Herw first, because the king must be within the community and the heart of the community, but it could not be done without Set and the knowledge of the empty loneliness of the desert.

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Daughter of Het-Herw and Khnum, Beloved of Set and Wepwawet
Chatting with: Anpw, Djehuty, Bast, Nebet-Het, and Sekhmet