Set Story: Part 5

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
Part 3
Part 4

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Set Story: Part 5


Now, lest you think I am perpetually god bothered, let me assure you that this is not the case. Once we had established that the rest of the pantheon was friendly and once I had opened up to receiving messages from other Names, Set more or less backed off and let me do as I pleased in my exploration of Kemetic paganism.  There were brief, infrequent encounters with him and other names, but most of the time I was on my own.

I accumulated better historical resources over time, but never entirely relied on them. I had been Wiccan for a short time, after all, and since the majority of my interaction with other pagans still took place on general forums, I had a tendency to swing back and forth between staunch reconstructionist leanings and freewheeling eclecticism, since those were the options which were most readily available to me.  But it was the space between those two extremes which led to some of my more interesting encounters with the Names. Like the time when I decided to “Kemeticisze” the winter solstice celebration and reframe it as a day dedicated to Set. I know; it’s a stretch…I didn’t say it was one of my shining moments:

In an attempt to convert the Wiccan wheel of the year into something I could still use on a Kemetic path, I decided that the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the darkest season, was an appropriate day to mark as a holiday of Set. In my revised mythos for the day, the long night was caused by a particularly fierce battle with the serpent preceding the nevertheless triumphant rise of the sun. The night-long vigil, then, was my symbolic support of my patron’s struggle as that battle raged. I even offered meat and the closest thing to wine that I was willing to consume (sparkling grape juice—I don’t do alcohol, a personal boundary he has thus far been willing to respect despite his own preferences). I laid out the food and "wine" at one of the darkest hours of the night in the predawn, with a solemn prayer offering the energy to help sustain him in his work.

I got so into it that I was surprised when he showed up to partake of the offerings. He literally sat across the table from me as I sat there staring dumbly at him. Then he looked at me with a bemused grin. What followed is easily the most awkward and idiotic conversations I have ever had with a deity.

What's wrong with you? Did you forget who you were offering to?  

“No, I just...I mean...shouldn’t you be…don’t you have something to be, you know, doing? Right now? At this moment?”

Are you referring to my ensuring the rise of the sun?

“Um...yes.”

You do realize that at any given moment in your time the sun is always rising somewhere on your planet. Do you not?

“Oh, well…that’s true…It’s just that I was doing this ritual to pay homage to your battles with the waxen one and—“

And even if the sun was not already rising with every breath you take, it is not so easy to preoccupy me completely. I am a god. I can, as you might say, “multi-task”. Now pour me more of this “wine”. 

Well, yeah. Duh. I realize that now…

But fun and games aside, there was a problem for me to deal with: the question of patronage. It seemed to be everywhere in the pagan world—various practitioners dedicating themselves to a specific god or goddess. It was so ubiquitous that I don’t think I ever recall meeting a polytheist who claimed to worship all the gods of a given pantheon without singling one out as a patron or matron. There were also a plethora of people worshiping a handful of patrons from different pantheons. But the undercurrent of their stories was mostly the same regardless of how it was phrased: they felt an intimate and personal connection to those gods. And newcomers to the faith often made finding that connection to deity their top priority.

Of course, I had few problems figuring out what to say in conversations where the question of patronage came up: clearly my patron was Set. He was the one I dealt with most frequently and had known the longest. And that in itself was not a problem…until I came across the Kemetic Orthodox concept of parentage. Unfortunately, I came across it out of context. I found a Kemetic Reconstructionist using “Mother” and “Father” to refer to deities and then stumbled across a brief explanation of why: “It’s the god or goddess that made you, whose essence is also your essence.”

That clicked and made sense to me. Set was the god of outsiders. I was an outsider. Set was a god of chaos. My life was always filled with chaos. Set was a god of storms. I was born during one and had always loved watching them. *Ding Ding* said my brain, we have a winner! But, as I understand now, that simplistic understanding of things was a bit far off the mark

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I read a book once which talked at great length about the ambiguity of chemical imbalance in the brain and the efficacy of treating that imbalance. How do we know, the book asked, whether a decrease in the level of serotonin in a given person’s brain is causal or dependent to a person’s mood? Psychiatric science works on the notion that the imbalance causes the mood disorder. Psychology justifies its worth by pointing out that we can’t be sure of that, because it is just as likely that a person’s mood might be causing the imbalance in chemicals. It’s a chicken or egg question, in some regard, and likely not something which can be determined due to the number of variables, so the book argues for using psychiatric and psychological techniques to cover all the bases.

 It is an interesting dilemma and tangential to the problem of patronage: how can I be sure if the things that happen in my life and the person I am are directly caused by my innate patronage, or are what drew my patron to me? The nature of our psyches change over time—how can we be sure what elements are truly our essence and which ones are merely in the forefront due to our current circumstances? 

But I digress.

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 I had decided for myself that my essence was his essence and, ultimately, that was a problem. Not that it was entirely a bad thing—it helped me make sense of my past and gave me a touchstone for dealing with the continuing problems in my life, but it also hindered me in an unexpected way: I took it not simply as an explanation of events in my life but as a set of expectations that I felt I needed to fit.

There was a buzz of an idea that I brushed away year after year whenever it cropped up. Community. More specifically, religious community, of which I had none. True I had my haunts on the general pagan scene, but nothing specifically Kemetic. But there was really only one organization which was not already defunct by the time I started looking into the idea: The House of Netjer. I had ignored the House of Netjer almost from the moment I knew it existed. (Which in retrospect was probably just as well, because I didn't have anything even resembling the maturity and humility needed to approach a community with an open mind.)

My issue with the House was rooted in my stalwart refusal to accept that  organized  religion of any kind could be at all beneficial to me. That was one part my upbringing and one part my view of my essential nature being that of an outsider: I wanted fellowship, but didn’t want the rules. And of course, there was something else which had always bothered me about the temple, one thing which no one doing even the most cursory research on the House (or even just reading posts on general pagan forums about them) could miss even if they tried: The RPD. Of course, I didn’t understand really what it was or why it was done, but at the time, I really didn’t want to.

“It doesn’t matter. Fellowship would be nice, but I don’t really need anyone else,” I told myself, “he raised me as an outsider precisely so I wouldn’t.”

But I realized eventually that it was awful lonely on the solitary path. I also saw again and again in my scholarly resources how important community was in Kemetic thought, and I came to understand that there was a reason for those rules, for that structure. It wasn’t an arbitrary feature of a state religion—it was woven into the fabric of the faith. Still I resisted. I delved into my local community and hung out on general pagan forums, and I did eventually patch together something that felt like community. It's a community that helped sustain me, and a community I still value to this day…but it wasn't enough.

And more importantly, though I could suppress my desire for company and convince myself the nature of the community didn't matter as long as I had one, there were moments when things in my life conspired to cloud my judgment and make hearing any of the Netjeru, even Set, extraordinarily hard...and it was always those moments when I really needed to hear them. It was the most recent of these incidents which finally woke me up to the truth: sometimes, I need other people--other Kemetics-- to see what I’m missing--to hear them for me when I cannot.

I won’t detail what happened here, because it is technically already on the blog under the separate page, To Strike the Waxen One Away. I will say that afterward I found myself lying on the floor at the foot of my shrine and looking up at where the shadows of the statues were cast on the wall by the candle light--trying to piece it all together. I had always been solitary on my path. Why did that have to change? My way had always worked before...but then, if had not been for the message delivered to me by one of their other children...by a member of the House no less…

“Am I wrong about them? Like I was wrong about Wesir?”  I asked.

 I saw the shadow cast by Set’s statue on the wall and realized that, from the angle I was viewing it from, it looked oddly hawk like, with something atop the head. Heru? I suddenly recalled that they were brothers as much as they were rivals. There was something oddly symbolic in how Set's statue could cast his brother's reflection. Strange. Why had I never noticed that shadow before? Set spoke:

Because you are on the floor. A different view requires a different perspective—and the humility to seek it. 

I found myself online later that evening, reading the website and, eventually, filling out an application for the beginner’s class.

“But I'm not going to do the RPD,” I told Set as I hit send. I had read that the beginner's class, and even membership in the temple, carried no obligation to undergo that rite of passage, and it didn’t seem like something which would be necessary to find what I was looking for, but there was a small niggling worry in my heart and I wanted Him to confirm what I thought I already knew, “I don’t need it. I already know you.”

To my surprise, he didn't respond.

 My heart skipped a beat in the silence.

 I was used to many things from him... but silence wasn't one of them.