So I got to thinking about Set again. Big Red is, after all, a fair part of how I got to where I am, here and writing this stuff.

Specifically, I got to thinking about one of Set's cosmic roles.

Set is Them.

The worldview at the root of Kemetic thought is one of fundamental order, fundamental organisation: a place for everything and everything in its place. There are norms, there are standards. There are the way things are done, and anything outside of that is potentially dangerous.

Left on its own, that can be a pretty stifling place. Fit in, conform, settle into your role, don't rock the boat.

(I think it's a norm of societies to have something of this sort, a set of behaviours that are unremarkable, with the different being something that can raise threat hackles.)

But then there's Set.

And Set is part of the system.

Set is one of Them. It doesn't really matter what the norms are, He's not playing along. He is solitary in a communitarian culture. He is queer in a culture full of straights. He is lefthanded, because that's statistically uncommon. He's a redhead. If you want even more blatant, He's the god of foreigners for a culture that is one of the world's first nation-states.

His nature as Other is dual, in this. One of these is a reinforcing of the strength of the system, because He challenges it by His being, and it has to face Him and thus become stronger. If the system does things one way, He is there to do it differently, and thus raise the question of why. A system unchallenged is weak -- He will be the first to tell anyone that, if they think to ask Him -- and every pattern has needs of being justified every so often so it does not sink into complacency and obsolescence.

At the same time, because existence demands reflection -- only by there also existing something that is not the same can the distinctiveness of what is be verified -- Them is necessary to Us. This can easily degenerate into pointless antagonism and hostility, and often does. But that synergy strengthens both sides, no matter how the duality is made up, because the distinction depends on difference. The existence of the Other prevents individuals being subsumed into the system as no more than components -- perhaps they recognise Other in themselves, or the system gets shaken up a little with a new accomodation to Other, but in any case, it is the Other that demands and drives growth.

But while He challenges the system to encompass more, He makes space for people to be weird. The system specifically includes Him, includes the Other as something that is. (Us and Them are allied against That Which Isn't, as forces of being.) And so there's a little space there made within a system that includes Set, has His big red elbows banging out space for Set to be Set, that includes the possibility that weirdness doesn't always destroy the system. Sometimes it's the challenge the system needs to grow up a little.

So I find myself poking at the process of reconstruction, and the process of Set. He was the one who told me to look into Feri -- and when I started finding myself doing the syncretisation that I'm doing and was worried about it, said (after I managed to get an answer out of Him), "Do you think I didn't know what you'd do with it?"

There's elbow room there to be had, in a path which is unapologetic and unashamed and definitively queer, with the bringing the edges of things to the center, with the challenge to old patterns that serve no use, links between power and sexuality, with the demand to grow up and step into one's strength -- there are many reasons I said to Him, "I can see why You like it."

Embracing Set is a frightening thing to do. Becoming the Other is stepping outside of the norms -- which are protective in intent and sometimes in nature, so long as they don't stifle -- and going alone into the desert. Bring plenty of water. Become a heretic.

Claim your elbow room.