Set Story: Part 2

So, I was asked how I came to meet and be involved with Set and started to type a “short” version of the story only to find that even the “short” version is incredibly long. So I’m doing a series of installments called Set Story. (I just had a moment where I envisioned a sort of Kemetic version of the How I Met Your Mother TV show, I hope that’s just my subconscious being *funny* because that show stretched out its premise waaaay too long...) 

Part 1

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Set Story: Part 2

That storm made landfall in my sophomore year of college. Which is almost funny, because for me, college was the Promised Land which I had been groomed to desire by my intellectual family, and with my advanced academic skills, I was privileged to more of its wonders than most: I was an honor’s student, which brought an automatic community, after-hours access to a library with (literally) millions of books, and seminar classes on issues of actual importance in the world. But it was also a place where I had a line to toe: atheism was the unofficial standard for the “real” honor’s students, and the religious were looked upon with suspicion.

So my Wiccan nightlife had to remain a guarded secret. At first, it was manageable, but depression plagued me as it became ever more apparent that despite our superficial similarities, I had little in common with the people around me. Then, a chance encounter with an aggressively anti-religious philosophy professor put me into a mode of spiritual and personal crisis.

Now, I’m going to pause here for a moment. When I first started writing this story I included what happened in his class and how an argument he made led me down a frightening path where I considered nonexistence as a viable option. No, not death, not suicide…nonexistence. I started to write down what it means to consider that, what it feels like when something fundamental in you begins to unravel like so much thread until there is nothing left…then I stopped. There is no way to explain it adequately and I don’t want to make light of it by trying. So I’m going to pick up in the aftermath, in the moment when I asked for salvation and got it.

I almost died once (a part of this story that I’ll cover later) because of a fever. The short version of that tale is that at some point in that fever induced hallucinatory fog where I wrongly believed everything was okay, there was still a shining moment of clarity when I realized I was dying and picked up my phone to call for help. It was as if there was some wiser fragment of me which was finally forced to intervene. Being uncreated was similar to dying in that respect. Some part of me, in one of those final moments when I almost can’t feel anything anymore, woke up and called for help.

“Is anyone even there?” I whispered one night.

Yes. 

It’s amazing how much a single word can change things. I sat stunned for a moment, then felt the unmistakable physical-yet-not-physical feel of a woman’s hand resting on my shoulder. There would come a day many years later when I would learn that all I ever needed to do was ask the question out loud, to give them permission to answer me, but at the time I didn’t bother to ask why they had suddenly spoken up. I had a different question in mind.

“Who are you?”

I didn’t get an immediate answer, but I got a sense that I would find the answer myself if I looked in the right place. I slept lightly that night. In the morning, I packed my backpack with snacks, a light jacket, and a notebook and slipped out of the dorms moving quickly past the other students buzzing about and preparing for their weekend. I was off to the library, my first steps on the road I’m still walking.

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Side note:

For a good many years, I thought that I had heard the voice of a Netjeru that night and spent a lot of time thinking on who it might have been before deciding that it had to be Set even if the voice was not the same. I realized just now, after writing this, that it was probably not Set, nor any single Netjeru—it was probably Netjer in general. Which would explain why a better answer to my second question wasn’t immediately forthcoming. How could they explain that concept clearly to a neophyte who barely knew anything about Kemet except what she had learned from The Mummy? I’m getting a nod in the back of my mind from them even as I type that. Hindsight really is 20/20.