Setite Sorcery

Followers of Set require no lengthy history lesson or abstruse discourse on theory to understand where their magic comes from. It comes from their god, Set. They
use magic to do as Set demands, addicting, seducing and degrading the world. Set made the rites for the use of his followers. What more needs to be asked?
Despite their professed disinterest in the origins and mechanics of their magic, Setites do derive from their deity a magical practice with a long and interesting history. In practice, it seems like rudimentary Necromancy or rough Thaumaturgy, yet it is not quite either. Setite sorcery is distinct. To understand it, one must first look at Set and his role in Egyptian mythology.

THE MYTH OF SET AND OSIRIS

Set appears in ancient Egyptian myth as the ultimate violator of the Life Principle as incarnated by Osiris, king of gods and embodiment of the fertility of the Nile. The wealth and prosperity of Egyptian society depended on the natural irrigation provided by the annual floodings of the Nile's banks, making Osiris the central figure in the Egyptian pantheon. When an envious Set fell upon his brother Osiris and dismembered him, the Nile ceased to flood, bringing famine to the people. Osiris' son, Horus, slew Set, allowing Isis, sister of both warring brothers and wife to Osiris, to find and piece together the scattered bits of her husband's corpse. Her action restored the fecundity of the land, even though Osiris himself now lacked the crucial component of a male fertility deity. His phallus, having been eaten by fish, could not be restored to his body. Unable to continue in his old role, Osiris became god of the underworld. As overseer of the fabled Western Lands, the abundant afterlife of Egyptian belief, he presided over the souls of the dead. He gave a part of his essence to each of Egypt's kings, the pharaohs, who became divine and took over his fertility duties.
Osiris was not the only figure in the story whose death forced a change of roles. Set found himself in the darkness, where he vowed eternal revenge against Osiris. In disguise, he crept into Osiris' new kingdom, the Western Lands, in search of information that would allow him to continue the war against his brother. He would wage this battle on two fronts, against Osiris' former kingdom and his new one. He would people the land of the living with undead progeny, continuing his primal struggle against everything that was alive and vital. Also, he would teach his new followers to steal power from the dwellers in the Western Lands, making a lie of Osiris' promises of eternal life.
A tiny minority of Setites immerse themselves in non-Egyptian mythologies, finding analogues to the story of Set and Osiris in the primal battles between rival gods featured in many origin stories. For example, a trio of Minnesota Setites who use neo-Nazi pagan bikers as minions took Loki's slaying of Baldur in the Norse legends as the basis for their adaptation of Setite magic.

RAIDING THE WESTERN LANDS

The magic of the ancient Egyptians revolved to a great extent around preparations for the afterlife. Life in Egypt served as a mere prelude to an eternity of comfort and pleasure in the Western Lands, at least for those Egyptians with the wherewithal to ensure that their bodies would be properly mummified and entombed in accordance with the precise instructions provided in the magical tome called The Book of Coming Forth by Day. (Today it appears on the shelves of any well-stocked bookstore under the title The Egyptian Book of the Dead.) Wealthy citizens, most especially pharaohs and members of their courts, spent much of their time and resources securing suitably impressive tombs for themselves. They stocked their burial chambers with everything a soul would require for life in the Western Lands. They piled these rooms high with jewels, furni-ture, perfumes, clothing and other luxury goods. In later eras, they filled them with ushtabis, miniature statues representing the servants who would serve them for eternity. All of the appurtenances of the tombs now seen in Egyptology departments of the world's muse-urns, from gold sarcophagi to canopic jars containing the preserved viscera of the deceased, were essential to the successful journey to the Western Lands.
Set's sorcery operates by blasphemously subverting the magic handed down by Osiris. He wrote his own book of death magic, The Book of Going Forth by Night, which teaches his followers to drain energy from souls residing in the Western Lands. In order to do so, they must seek out the tombs of freshly dead individuals buried in accordance with the rites of The Book of Coming Forth by Day. They exhume the corpses, stealing the canopic jars and as much of the other symbols of wealth and comfort found in the tombs as they can carry back to their lairs. Set's followers then dissect the mummy, splaying it out and pinning it down according to Set's exacting specifications. They reposition the canopic jars, inverting the four cardinal directions in which they are supposed to be arranged.
The Book of Going Forth by Night claims that the soul of the desecrated mummy, previously comfortable and resplendent in the mansions of the Western Land, suffers a seizure and withers away into a state of unceas-ing torment. The afflicted soul writhes in pain and shrieks unintelligibly. Its condition strikes terror into the breasts of his companions in the Western Land, and
reminds Osiris that the Lord of the Dead is indeed more powerful than himself.
For pleasing his god in this way, the sorcerer gains a material benefit. As long as his captured mummy remains in the mystical pattern of desecration, he draws mystical energy from it, which he can use to fuel his other magical sendings. Ancient Setites zealously guard the secret tombs containing their appropriated mummies. Modern initiates face a challenge in securing victims of their own: The religion Set's magic blasphemes is no longer extant. Original mummies lie under glass in museums, where their absence would be too easily missed, or remain hidden under the Egyptian sands, eluding Setites and Egyptologists alike. Setite leaders maintain contacts in the Egyptian antiquities ministry in hopes of diverting ill-publicized finds to favored neonates, but demand nevertheless outstrips supply. The troublesome rarity of suitable original mummies forces them to seek modern substitutes.
Most Setites believe that any mortal who sees to it that his final resting place serves as a glorious reflection of his achievements in life ends up in the Western Lands, never mind his intended post-death destination. Although not as efficacious as a corpse buried according to the full specifications of The Book of Coming Forth by Day, the remains of these accidental travelers to the Western Lands can be used as Setite magical foci. Setites scour obituary pages of the rich and celebrated in search of candidates for tomb-robbing. They look for elaborate crypts, monuments, and the burial of items of wealth. A well-heeled, flamboyant Texan who arranged to be buried in her red Ferrari proved to be a rich source of energy for her Setite graverobber. The elements of an ostentatious self-memorial needn't all be found at the gravesite: Individuals who endow schools, museums or libraries to commemorate their accomplishments and remind others of the wealth may also wind up in the Western Lands.
A recently incorporated business in California charges a handsome fee to bury the dead in a simulated Egyptian style. The deceased rests in a sarcophagus in a pyramidal tomb, adorned with a solid-gold death mask, after having undergone a process combining ancient mummification rituals with freeze-drying technology. The company's marketing material targets both eccentric status-seekers and members of the New Age movement. Needless to say, the company's shareholders are all Setites, and the bodies don't stay in those pyramidal tombs for long.
Other modern attempts to elude the Grim Reaper also provide raw material for Setite sorcerers. About a sixth of the frozen corpses occupying the storage facili-ties of cryogenics labs belong to individuals unexpect-edly spending eternity at Osiris' side. The rest of them are useless. In young Setite jargon, a useful cyrogenically frozen corpse is referred to as a "cherry Popsicle."
Although the Setites believe in the literal reality of the Western Lands, other Kindred familiar with their practices think otherwise. Their magic might be pow-ered by the intensity of their faith alone even if that faith is utterly misplaced or by some other force. A few bold Giovanni Necromancers reckon that Set's Western Lands are nothing more than some undistinguished backwater of the Underworld.

SETITE SENDINGS

Once the sorcerer has his focus in place, he's ready to work Set's magic. The serpent deity created his sorcerous sendings to subject all manifestations of the Life Principle to the forces of decay, degradation, disorganization, entropy and chaos. Things that are strong, vital and pure must be weakened, drained and adulterated.
The means by which sorcerers evoke this magic stems from ancient Egyptian practice. Favored magical processes include the writing of hieroglyphs, the formulation and application of perfumes and unguents, and the cursing of enemies with the aid of canopic jars.
Every society that learned to represent spoken language in written form at one time regarded that process as magic. Every magical tradition arising from such a society teaches that words contain inherent power. Set's sorcerers take this pronouncement one step further by claiming that the hieroglyphic language of the ancient Egyptians is more powerful than any other. They make this claim because hieroglyphs are pictographic that is, the word for something is also a drawing of that thing. Thus the connection between the word and the thing that it represents is stronger in a pictographic script than in a phonetic one, in which letters represent sounds which are strung together to form words. Non-pictographic languages are abstract, but the ancient hieroglyphs are concrete, and therefore contain the essence of that which is represented. Many Setite paths and rituals include the transcription of formulae from The Book of Going Forth by Night in hieroglyphic form. The power of a sending increases with the complexity of the process and the permanence of the result. Faithfulness to original methods of writing also matters. Thus it is good to write a formula in wet clay with a stylus, because it will harden into a nearly indestructible tablet, but better still to chisel it into solid stone in imitation of the bas-relief seen on so many ancient Egyptian monuments and tomb walls. Pen and ink technique on papyrus still provides some additional benefit, but hieroglyphs scrawled in ball-point on the back of a cocktail napkin at a Kindred fete lessen the sorcerer's chances of success.
Salves and perfumes serve as another medium for the delivery of magical effects. They garner results in situations where the sorcerer expects to gain the oppor-tunity to apply these potent substances to his target. Traditional Egyptian magicians used these substances to heal the body and mind. Setite sorcerers use them to corrode flesh and confuse the senses. They create a particularly mind-warping variant of the fashionable drug MDMA by adding an unguent derived from hyena bladders to the chemical recipe. They've also expanded the use of these substances to non-living targets; they may create unguents to burn away stone or corrode a computer's hard drive. One substance moves like a slug, slowly covering an object's surface. It then crawls away into a dark corner to form itself into a perfect, albeit hollow, replica of the object.
Canopic jars provide the third cornerstone of Setite sorcery. These are the clay vessels used in tombs to store the internal organs of the deceased. Set taught his followers how to expand their use to the living. Traditional practice employed four canopic jars, each corresponding to a direction, a deity and an organ or organs of the body. The south jar contained the deceased's stomach and large intestines, and drew association with the human-looking deity Amset. The north jar, dedicated to the baboon god Hapi, held the small intestines. Under the protection of Tuamutef the jackal, the east jar kept the heart and lungs. Khebsemuf the hawk watched over the west jar and its liver and gallbladder. When at all possible, Setite sorcerers secure tissue samples from these organs and place them in the appropriate jars, in order to gain power over the tissue donors. For this reason, some Setites work as lab technicians, orderlies or medical waste disposal specialists in hospitals; others simply bribe hospital personnel to provide them with the desired samples.