Temple of Set

The Temple of Set is an initiatic order founded in San Francisco in 1975 by Michael Aquino and a group of priests and priestesses who had resigned together from the Church of Satan. It is the principal organised body of contemporary theistic left-hand-path practice in the English-speaking world. Its central deity is Set, the Egyptian god of isolate consciousness and separation from the cosmic order; its central practice is Xeper — the directed development of the practitioner’s individual self into a stable and divine identity.

The Temple is distinct from the Church of Satan on the central question of metaphysical realism. Where Anton LaVey’s Satan is an atheistic symbol of carnal nature, the Temple’s Set is presented as a real non-natural agent, accessible through ritual and directed magical work. Setian doctrine treats this distinction as fundamental: the project of the left-hand path is the active development of an individual will that is genuinely separate from the natural order, not the celebration of natural appetite under a defiant symbol.