December 8, 2009
Praising the beauty of Set
After yesterday’s post on the gifts of Set’s storms, a thought occurred to me, although it’s actually rooted in a realization from the day of the snowfall itself: from standing in the shrine room, having just offered candle flame and rum-flavored iced tea to Set, gazing out the window at the darkening afternoon, and being struck with the sudden beauty of it, the gentle and relentless descent of the snow, the world beneath the clouds possessed of a profound stillness and yet also of a dynamic energy, a subtly electric tension.
There’s a danger in constructing a false dichotomy where Set is all wildness and chaotic upheaval and Heru is all beauty and transformed, purified order. Like the Taoist yin-yang symbol, even though They’re opposites, They also contain the seeds of each other. Heru has His wildness too, in the tearing claws, in the battering power of unfettered wings, in the unleashed might of the King as warrior, like a lion in the carnage of battle. And Set is beautiful in and of Himself, not merely for what He gives way to. “You are beautiful,” I told Him in the shrine room that afternoon, awed. It seemed to amuse Him. So here are a few more words on the beauty of Set.
Praising the Beauty of Set
O Set, I praise Your great and implacable beauty:
in the looming majesty of the thunderhead,
in the shivery hush of snow falling at twilight,
in the lightning-edged whorls of the fractal,
in the wind-carved austerity of the desert at high noon,
in the fierce and subtle glitter of its sands.
Your ecstasy is in the howl of passion, of exertion,
in the stretch of the body driven beyond all rational limits,
in the hot, animal confusion of desire and of war.
Your rage is in the cold, burning weight of the iron blade,
perfect in balance, the shuddering slip of the faultline,
the swift-swelling wave that rises, curling and smooth, to block out the sky.
In all of Your wonder and Your terror, You are beautiful:
You are all things exotic and rare and deeply strange.
Your hands are scented with myrrh, with frankincense,
with perfumes from far-off lands that have not yet been named.
Son of Nut, Your smile is the nuclear flare of an exploding star,
expending its light and heat without limit into the black void of space.
You are the crocodile-jawed storm of destruction,
You are the raw shout of defiance snatched away by the teeth of the gale,
and You are the defiance that remains sealed within the heart, silent and pure.
In Your two hands, You hold despair and hope.
In all things, O Set, You are beautiful.
Dua Set! Nekhtet!