A priest in the city of Hardai once watched two jackals fight over a carcass near the necropolis. One tore the meat. The other preserved the bones. He saw in that struggle the oldest story in Egypt: the god who unmakes and the god who remakes, locked in a contest that neither can win because both are necessary.
Anubis and Set represent the two poles of death in Egyptian mythology: Anubis as the embalmer who guides the soul toward rebirth, Set as the chaotic force that tears bodies apart before they can be preserved. Their rivalry is not a simple battle of good versus evil. It is a theological argument about what happens to the dead, who controls the threshold, and whether destruction has a place in the cycle of life.
Where the Rivalry Began: The Osiris Myth
The conflict between Anubis and Set originates in the oldest surviving Egyptian funerary texts, the Pyramid Texts (circa 2400 BCE). In this cycle of spells carved into the walls of the pyramid of Unas, the story is already complete: Set murders his brother Osiris, dismembers the body into fourteen pieces, and scatters them across Egypt. Anubis is the one who finds the pieces, reassembles them, and performs the first mummification.
This is not a myth about two gods who happened to disagree. It is a founding narrative that explains why Egyptian embalming exists at all. Every priest who wrapped a body was reenacting Anubis’s original work. Every corpse that decayed before the ritual was finished was a victory for Set.
The Pyramid Texts call Anubis “the one who is upon his mountain,” a reference to the necropolis at Abydos where the earliest royal tombs were cut into the desert cliffs. Set is called “the red one,” a name that links him to the desert, the color of dried blood, and the foreign lands beyond Egypt’s borders. The geography alone tells you what these gods represent: Anubis belongs to the ordered space of the cemetery, Set to the wilderness that threatens it.
What Each God Actually Does
Anubis is not a god of death in the sense of causing it. He is a god of the dead, which is a different thing entirely. His domain begins after the heart stops. He presides over the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, the ritual that allows the mummy to eat, speak, and breathe in the afterlife. He places his hand on the scales during the weighing of the heart, ensuring the judgment is fair. In the Book of the Dead (compiled around 1550 BCE), Anubis is shown leading the deceased by the hand into the Hall of Two Truths.
Set is the god of chaos, storms, war, and the desert. He is not evil in the Christian sense. He is necessary. The Egyptians recognized that the world requires disruption to function. The sun dies every night. The Nile floods. Crops rot. Set is the force behind all of these, and without him, nothing would change. In the Contendings of Horus and Set (recorded on papyrus around 1160 BCE), Set is portrayed as crude, violent, and sexually aggressive, but he is also the defender of Ra’s solar barque against the serpent Apophis. He is the monster who saves the sun.
The rivalry between Anubis and Set is therefore not symmetrical. Anubis works within the framework of order. Set breaks the framework. They meet only at the moment of death, where Set’s destruction creates the material that Anubis must preserve.
How the Rivalry Plays Out in Funerary Practice
Egyptian embalming was a direct response to Set’s violence. The fourteen pieces of Osiris became the template for how a body should be treated. The brain was removed through the nose. The internal organs were removed, dried, and stored in canopic jars. The body was covered in natron for forty days. Each of these steps was a ritual act that reversed the scattering Set had performed.
Anubis was invoked at every stage. The embalmer wore a jackal mask to become Anubis. The knife used to make the incision in the left side of the abdomen was called the “Set knife,” because the cut itself was a small act of chaos that had to be controlled. The priest who made the cut was cursed and chased away from the body afterward, a ritual reenactment of the expulsion of Set from the realm of the dead.
This detail matters. The Egyptians did not pretend Set was absent from the embalming chamber. They acknowledged that destruction is part of preservation. You cannot wrap a body without first cutting it open. The Set knife was necessary. The priest who wielded it was ritually blamed for doing what had to be done.
The Theological Problem Set Poses
Anubis is easy to understand. He is the friend of the dead, the guide, the protector. Set is harder. The Egyptians themselves struggled with him. During the Second Intermediate Period (circa 1650 BCE), the Hyksos rulers of the Nile Delta adopted Set as their chief god, equating him with their own storm god Baal. After the Hyksos were expelled, Set’s reputation suffered. In the New Kingdom (circa 1550 BCE onward), Set was increasingly demonized. His statues were defaced. His name was erased from monuments.
But the old temples never stopped honoring him. At the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, built around 1290 BCE, Set appears alongside Horus in the reliefs, offering the ankh to the pharaoh. The Ombite nome in Upper Egypt remained a center of Set worship into the Ptolemaic period. The Egyptians did not resolve the tension between Anubis and Set. They lived with it.
This is where the rivalry becomes relevant to anyone who works with Egyptian deities today. Anubis represents the part of death that can be managed, ritualized, and transformed. Set represents the part that cannot. The body that decays too fast. The soul that refuses to answer the judgment. The death that comes without warning and leaves nothing behind.
Anubis vs Set in Modern Practice
Contemporary Kemetic reconstructionists and eclectic practitioners approach the rivalry differently. Some honor both gods, recognizing that chaos and order are complementary forces. Others refuse to work with Set at all, citing his association with violence and disruption. A third group sees Set as a necessary ally for shadow work and boundary breaking.
Anubis is almost universally respected. He is one of the few Egyptian gods who crosses traditions without controversy. His role as psychopomp translates easily into modern funerary practice. People light candles for him when they are grieving. They ask him to guide the souls of their dead. They place statues of him on ancestor altars.
Set is more contentious. Some practitioners invoke him for protection against external threats, drawing on his role as the defender of Ra. Others use him in spellwork aimed at destroying obstacles or breaking unhealthy patterns. The danger is real. Set does not distinguish between what needs to be destroyed and what you might want to keep. He is not a god for the cautious.
Common Misconceptions About the Rivalry
The most persistent error is the assumption that Anubis and Set are enemies in the way that Horus and Set are enemies. They are not. Horus fights Set for the throne of Osiris. That is a political conflict about succession and legitimacy. Anubis and Set have no such quarrel. They occupy different domains. Their paths cross only at the moment of embalming, and even then, they cooperate.
A second misconception is that Set is the Egyptian equivalent of Satan. This is a late development, influenced by Greek and Christian interpretations. Set was never a figure of absolute evil in Egyptian theology. He was dangerous, yes, but so was the desert. So was the flood. So was the sun at noon. The Egyptians did not moralize nature.
A third error is the belief that Anubis judges the dead. He does not. He weighs the heart against the feather of Ma’at, but the judgment is pronounced by Osiris and the tribunal of forty-two assessor gods. Anubis is the technician of the scales, not the judge. His role is to ensure the process is accurate, not to decide the outcome.
FAQ
Which god is more powerful, Anubis or Set? Power is not the right framework. Set is stronger in the sense of raw destructive force. Anubis has more influence over the afterlife. They are not competing in the same arena.
Can you worship both Anubis and Set? Yes, but understand what you are asking for. Anubis requires discipline and ritual precision. Set requires courage and a willingness to let things break. They do not conflict, but they will pull you in different directions.
Why is Set associated with the color red? Red was the color of the desert, of foreign lands, and of dried blood. Set was called the red god because his domain was the sterile red land beyond the black fertile soil of the Nile valley.
Does Anubis ever fight Set in the myths? Not directly. The Pyramid Texts describe Set attacking Osiris, and Anubis repairing the damage. But the two gods never meet in combat. Their rivalry is structural, not personal.
The Rivalry as a Mirror
The struggle between Anubis and Set is not a story about gods. It is a story about what happens to every body after death. Something tears it apart. Something puts it back together. The embalmer and the storm are both at work in the same room. The Egyptians understood this. They built their entire funerary tradition around the tension between the two.
We do not mummify our dead anymore. But we still face the same choice. Do we let the chaos have the final word, or do we try to preserve what can be saved? Anubis and Set offer no compromise because none is possible. The body will decay. The soul will travel. Both gods are present at every funeral. The only question is which one you call on first.
For a deeper exploration of the Egyptian pantheon, see our guide to Egyptian deities. You may also want to read about the weighing of the heart ceremony and the role of the psychopomp in funerary magic.