Introduction
Set is the god of storms, the desert, chaos and foreign lands — a complex and ambivalent figure in Egyptian religion, both a dangerous adversary of order and, in other contexts, a valued protector of Ra against the chaos-serpent Apophis.
Family
Fratricide and Long Contest
Set's murder of Osiris out of jealousy over the throne, and his subsequent decades-long struggle against Osiris's avenging son Horus for control of Egypt, form one of the central conflicts of Egyptian mythology — eventually resolved, in most versions, by a divine tribunal ruling in Horus's favor. Manetho's later king-list similarly records Set as a usurper-king following his murder of the king Osiris, before Horus's restoration of rightful rule. Despite this villainous role, Set was also honored in other contexts, notably as the god who spears the serpent Apophis nightly from the prow of Ra's solar barque.
Ancient Egyptian religion spanned three millennia and many regional cult centers, so parentage, roles and even gender pairings for a given deity often differ between the Heliopolitan, Hermopolitan, Memphite and Theban theological systems; the account above follows the most widely attested classical version.