Set Story: Part 3

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
Part 2
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Set Story: Part 3

I didn’t think I would find what I was looking for in the library’s book stacks—which was mainly because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I bypassed them and headed to the sprawling sea of computer stations on the main floor to log in on a machine and check the pagan forums I had haunted as a teen. I found the sheer number of pantheons and cultures overwhelming. But I did encounter a suggestion that one way to go about narrowing the options down was for one to simply pick a pantheon and a god and ask the deity in question to take one under wing for a few days, and see how it goes. Even if that deity didn’t respond, the process of elimination alone could ultimately lead to an answer—one could hope to just get lucky early in the search.

I spent the lunch hour thinking it over. After my teenage experience of calling on “Brigid” randomly from a book, it was at least a tactic I was familiar with. But I was skeptical: there were hundreds of names in that book. I went home and put it out of my mind for a few weeks, hoping for some revelation, or failing that, a sign.

I ended up going to college in Las Vegas. I hadn’t wanted to originally, but the school that I had set my heart on didn’t admit me and UNLV was the better of the options I had left (the honor’s college invitation had sealed it for me—none of the other schools offered me that). I hated the city when I first moved there. I was used to open plains and fantastic prairie skies. I was used to storms in the summer, migrating geese in the fall, and crystal sparkling snow in the winter. Vegas was dusty and dirty and unchanged year round. Even the temperature varied only slightly. But it did have the strip—and even if I didn’t drink or gamble or have much money to spend on shows and such, there was fantastic architecture and people watching to my heart’s content.

I didn’t usually go to the strip alone, especially at night,  but one day, out of the blue, I decided I wanted to go to the new age store I frequented and see if any of the deity statues spoke to me. It was about as good as picking a name from a list, I reasoned, and perhaps I would get a better feel from an image than I would from just seeing a name. I hopped on a bus that evening and headed for the store in question—a little shop under the escalator at the center of my favorite casino: the Luxor.

Yep. The big black pyramid shaped, Egyptian themed one. It’s almost ironic how I never even thought to look up the Egyptian pantheon despite the number of hours I probably spent walking through all those Egyptian themed shops and eating at that Egyptian themed café and sneakily taking pictures with my friends in the fake King Tut exhibit. But to me, Ancient Egypt was a kitschy Hollywood trend—The Mummy was an entertaining movie, and I remembered reading a chapter on the Pyramids in a history text book once, but my experience outside that watered down commercialized version of Ancient Egyptian culture was very limited.

In any case, I putzed around the Pyramid Shop for a long time without seeing anything interesting. It was actually on my way back out of the casino that something on a sale table outside a souvenir shop caught my eye. It was a tiny Egyptian style box with a black jackal sitting on it. “Anubis Box”, read the tag. I put it back down and was a bit surprised when it pained me to do so—I really liked it. But while I didn’t know much (read: didn’t know anything) about the Egyptian gods, I knew Anubis was a “death god” of some kind. However, I couldn’t quite put it down. The briefest thought crossed my mind—what if…could I ask him? Why not? It at least gave me a reason to buy the box.

I took it home and put it on my desk in my dorm room. Immediately after doing so I felt silly. This couldn’t be the right god. It couldn’t even be the right pantheon. I went to bed, convinced I was going crazy. And… it proceeded to stare at me all night to the point where I was uncomfortable and couldn’t sleep.

Would you believe me if I told you that, despite that, I didn’t take the hint?

Well, I didn’t. I had this idea in my head that, surely, only a European pantheon would be interested in a tall, day-glow white, blued-eyed, girl with German ancestry. I couldn’t conceive of finding any important part of my destiny in Africa, of all places—that legacy couldn’t possibly belong to me. Besides, in general, jackals aside, I found the Egyptian god statues ugly to look at. Eventually, I got up and put the “Anubis Box” in a drawer so I could get some sleep.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Suddenly, references to Ancient Egypt were popping up all over the place. Every other post on the pagan forums seemed to be talking about this or that Egyptian god. Then, in a thread on finding patron deities, I came across a post where one woman was talking about a god she referred to as Big Red. I got a sudden flash back to the image of the figure I had seen in that early ritual I did as a teen. Red hair…it was only coincidence, right? Other voices chimed into the conversation on that discussion, relating their own experiences with him. Naming him properly: Set.

The name wouldn’t leave me, even well after I left the library that night. In fact, no matter what I did or where I went I couldn’t quite distract myself enough to keep from thinking on it. But when I did break down and do a web search on the name, what I found was not encouraging. The god of desert, storms, and foreigners. That I could handle but…Chaos? Darkness? The murder and mutilation of his brother? He didn’t sound much like the sort of god one ought to follow. And yet, there was something compelling about him, and he was being portrayed differently on the forums: a god of outsiders, trials, and initiations. The more I read the more I felt that there was something there worth looking into.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to do some real research. I hit up the library again, and this time I went to the book stacks, I found exactly what I was looking for: Egyptology texts. I did a lot of reading and learned fairly quickly that Set was one of the more confusing figures in Ancient Egyptian mythology, and that the forum goers had the right of it: his near demonization came later in history.

But it actually wasn’t the information about Set specifically which caught my attention—it was the information about Ancient Egyptian religion itself. I found myself agreeing with things I stumbled across and I was intuitively drawn to descriptions of Ancient Egyptian magic and ritual. That surprised me. Maybe there was something to all of this after all.

I found myself at a railing on the top floor of the library looking down seven stories into the main lobby. The sense of space was at once freeing and terrifying. Fearful of the height, I kept back from the ledge. But it was quiet and empty there, and I found myself talking the emptiness, asking,

“So, you’re… Set. Aren’t you?”

Hey kid. What took you so long?

I was startled to get a response, but something clicked suddenly inside me. It was like finally turning a puzzle piece just right and feeling it snap into place. I was filled with trepidation, but when you have a god talking to you, and staring at you expectantly, you can’t help but respond.

 And so it started.