8.  Set was the son of Seb and Nut, and the husband of Nephthys.  At a very early period he was regarded as the brother and friend of “Horus the Elder,” the Aroueris of the Greeks, and Set represented the night whilst Horus represented the day.  Each of these gods performed many offices of a friendly nature for the dead, and among others they set up and held the ladder by which the deceased made his way from this earth to heaven, and helped him to ascend it.  But, at a later period, the views of the Egyptians concerning Set changed, and soon after the reign of the kings called “Seti,” i.e., those whose names were based upon that of the god, he became the personification of all evil, and of all that is horrible and terrible in nature, such as the desert in its most desolate form, the storm and the tempest, etc.  Set, as a power of nature, was always waging war with Horus the Elder, i.e., the night did battle with the day for supremacy; both gods, however, sprang from the same source, for the heads of both are, in one scene, made to belong to one body.  When Horus, the son of Isis, had grown up, he did battle with Set, who had murdered Horus’s father Osiris, and vanquished him; in many texts these two originally distinct fights are confused, and the two Horus gods also.  The conquest of Set by Horus in the first conflict typified only the defeat of the night by the day, but the defeat of Set in the second seems to have been understood as the victory of life over death, and of good over evil.  The symbol of Set was an animal with a head something like that of a camel, but it has not yet been satisfactorily identified; figures of the god are uncommon, for most of them were destroyed by the Egyptians when they changed their views about him.

9.  NEPHTHYS was the sister of Isis and her companion in all her wanderings and troubles; like her she had a place in the boat of the Sun at creation, when she probably typified the twilight or very early night.  She was, according to one legend, the mother of Anubis by Osiris, but in the texts his father is declared to be R[=a].  In funeral papyri, stelae, etc., she always accompanies Isis in her ministrations to the dead, and as she assisted Osiris and Isis to defeat the wickedness of her own husband (Set), so she helped the deceased to overcome the powers of death and the grave.

Here then we have the nine gods of the divine company of Heliopolis, but no mention is made of Horus, the son of Isis, who played such an important part in the history of his father Osiris, and nothing is said about Thoth; both gods are, however, included in the company in various passages of the text, and it may be that their omission from it is the result of an error of the scribe.  We have already given the chief details of the history of the gods Horus and Thoth, and the principal gods of the other companies may now be briefly named.