Addiction, debasement, corruption, and desperation strike fear into many Kindred who worry that theirs will become an unlife of ruin, but to the Followers of Set, these and more are the tools of the trade. Pimps, pushers, and priests, the Setites cater to the needs of the desperate, and convert them to a nihilistic cause in doing so. Whether one needs flesh, money, drugs, or dark secrets, the Followers of Set can provide it, and when they do so, they all but guarantee themselves a return visit from those who seek them.

The Followers of Set are as much a chthonic religion as they are a clan, though the faith includes the clan. Its mythology is complex and convoluted, an impenetrable pantheon of god-monsters. At the apex of this worship stands a syncretism of the Egyptian Lord of the Underworld Set and the Greek hydra Typhon, as much spiritual guardians of secret places as they are the “liberators” of other’s souls. To outsiders, this is all blasphemous religious affectation, but to devout Setites, the cult and cause are real, and their dark lord works his will through them.

Needless to say, the politics of desperation and the placation of evil gods place the Serpents on the outside of Kindred society. The Setites are fine with this. The Kindred can often find themselves in need of what the Followers of Set purvey, and the extra “service” of secrecy is one the Setites are happy to provide — at a premium. The Setites offer a devil’s deal, but on their own terms. That way, when they collect their due and feed blood and souls into the maw of the Typhonic beast, all of its sacrifices have been given willingly.

History is a Twisted Spine

You have track marks on your soul. They form constellations. We know their chthonic names. We can tell you the appellations of the Unseen Ones who coil around this flat circle of time. We know the invisible paths. Second scar to the right and straight on...

The others name us Tempter. That’s as useful as calling a horse a horseshoe. We are seekers of hidden knowledge. The other Clans are accidental siblings. We are a faith. The others are the spawn of a mortal turned into monster. We are the children of a god. The others hate us because we can see the glory concealed in the raggedy mundane. We see divinity in a putrid alley, in the hieroglyphs formed by bird flocks in flight, the deities locked beneath the Y-incision of a cadaver. We know existence is an absurdist party and Last Call is the heat death of the universe.

Ever get to wondering why the Sun has a particular hate on for us? It’s not because we are creatures of darkness. We only wrapped ourselves in the dark to weather the powers that persecute us. The Sun loathes us because we illuminate the mysteries it fears to shine upon.

You’ve taken the sacrament of blood. Now accept the sacrament of secrets. Take these words, devour them with your ears, and know that the voice of the storyteller is your god.

Three Tales of Set

The truth is a flimflammer’s game. The cups and balls con. The Romans called it acetabula et calculi. Call it thimblerig or the shell game or three-card monte. It dates all the way back to ancient Egypt. Step right up. Try your luck. Lift my broken cup. Consider these tales three.

This is the first story, and the story goes like this.

Fratricide, a brotherly murder, but a tale older than Caine and Abel. The brothers were gods. This is back when deities ruled the people openly. Ra, god of the sun and ruler of all, grew old and decided to retire. In his infinite senility, he chose grandson Osiris as his heir.

This angered Set, mightiest warrior among gods. Every night, Set guarded Ra’s sun-barque as it passed under the Earth from the gates of dusk to the gates of dawn. Every night, Set did battle with Apep, the Great Serpent of Darkness. Where was justice? Where was Set’s reward?

Jealous and pride-wounded, Set hatched a plot. He offered up a most luxuriant sarcophagus to whosoever it fit. All the gods took a turn. When Osiris lay inside, Set leapt forward with seventy-two assistants and nailed the sarcophagus closed. He threw it into the Nile, drowning Osiris. Isis, Osiris’s sister-wife, used her magic to retrieve her husband’s corpse. Set would have none of this. He hacked the body to bits, scattering the parts across Egypt.

Once again, Isis called upon her arts and methodically gathered the fragments. She rebuilt the body and conceived a child by her dead husband. Horus the Avenger grew to manhood and did battle with Set. Horus lost an eye. Set was castrated. In the end, nephew thwarted uncle. Osiris became King of the Dead and his son became King of the Living. Set loped into the outskirts. He thundered in the sky and made men afraid.

This is the second story, and the story goes like this.

Set was born between earth and sky and raised on blood and sand. Seven thousand years ago, on the shores of the Nile, he came screaming into the world as all mortals do. A mighty warrior and hunter, Set’s skill at arms helped conquer and unite Upper and Lower Egypt.

However, Grandfather Ra was a jealous and fearful ruler, his mind gnawed by the worm of age. He slaughtered his own children in paranoia. Greathearted Set cried out against the filicide and Ra banished him to the burning wastes. Treacherous Osiris remained silent.

There are those who say that the grandson of Ra came upon a bestial figure in the wasteland. This sphinx terror tore from the night on wing and talon and challenged Set to a game of riddles. He lost, and so Ennoia, mother of Gangrel, showed him just what could walk on four legs, two legs, three legs, and no legs at all. She ate up all of Set’s insides and filled him with her own howling blood. Set awoke a bestial thing as well. In his desert solitude, he became enamored of reptiles and cradled lonely delusions of godhood. So it is said, but these are nothing but the fictions of the Outlanders, their brains heavy with jackal dung and musk.

This, however, is true: in his exile, Set met his immortal sire, of the Second Generation of Caine. Embraced into undeath, he came to the Second City. As the Book of Nod says, the Third Generation rose up and devoured their parents. Fearing their fangs would find him next, Set fled the city, swearing vengeance on his blasphemous siblings. There are those who say that he suffered banishment for eating the heart of a brood mate, but these are the words of liars and rumormongers.

Set returned to Egypt to gather an army, only to find that a Cainite had Embraced treacherous Osiris as well. Fang to fang, brother against brother, that old song. Set dismembered Osiris. Set killed Horus. Isis called up her vile magic piecing together her undead husband and resurrecting her son. Set struck again, slaying Osiris and Isis and maiming his nephew. The dance went on for centuries. The Spell of Life was primordial magic and powerful. Horus could die, but he was only reborn again and again. Eventually, Set found himself cast out of Egypt.

Exiled to the desert, a brother to serpents and a companion to scorpions, Set vowed to become as deadly as the sand. Betrayed by his kin both mortal and immortal, Set vowed to turn treachery and corruption against them. He created his children to carry on his war against the cult of Amon-Ra, the cult of Isis, and the Children of Osiris.

This is the third story, and the story goes like this.

The Book of Nod is false. Caine is a lie. The First City was Annu, the city of Ra. Set, Osiris, Isis, and the rest were gods. This story begins at the end of the first, with the victory of Horus.

Ra cast Set into Duat, the Underworld, the river of death whose waters flow from the Primeval Ocean itself. In the dark, wriggling reek and stinking of blind fish, Set did battle with Apep. He slew the Worm of Darkness and ate its heart. He gained Apep’s wisdom, knew things from before the Before. Set at once saw the truth: jealous Ra had lied to his children. He had not created the universe, only shaped a small portion of the Primeval Waters. Souls could differ in kind but not in size. All souls could grow as mighty as their tyrant fathers, could become creators themselves.

In the form of a serpent, Set stealthily returned to the living world to subvert the will of Ra. Hated by his grandfather, Set found he had to hide from the wrath of the Sun. Having swallowed the waters of death, Set found he was not fully alive. Set gathered twelve disciples to share his wisdom and begin his holy war. Through a warrior’s rite, he mingled his blood with theirs, and they all shared in great Set’s divinity. However, just as they drank, the other gods arrived.

Furious, Ra cursed the twelve. Like Set, they would hide from the Sun and were forsaken the warmth of life. Since they sealed their pact with blood, they would eat only blood. The twelve begged and pleaded with Ra, bore false witness against Set, and in that moment of cowardice, the twelve lesser Clans were born

The lesser Clans create lies out of their fear and hate of Set. Lies and treachery haunt the history of the Kindred, even in the three stories I share. Care to play my shell game? Can you find the truth? Whether Set was born a mortal or a god — or whether he ate the heart of the Typhon Serpent or it crawled down his mouth and ate his — whatever it was that slithered back out of Duat, it knew a hunger for the deeper mysteries, for the Primeval truths. We carry on that hunger. We are explorers.

The Ancient World

In Pharaonic Egypt, we ruled the night. At least, that’s how our crafty tongues will spin it. When the other Clans came to elder Khem, they paid fealty to the Hierophants of Set. Thanks to Egypt’s population, the Setites became one of the most numerous Clans of the ancient world. Yet our fortunes rose and fell like the Nile, for our enemies were manifold and multiform.

Let me tell you about the Aeons. They are real. They are not metaphors. They are the crawling metaphors, the nasty abstracts, the living agency. They are the Invisibles, the Mysteries. The demon-gods of the Duat are real. As they are real, so too are the Bau — the divine servitors, messengers, and angels. They wear the faces of the gods from whom they emanate. As the Bau are real, so too are their masters, the Aeons. They are the gods who serve the Sun, who by any name is just as merciless. The lies of the Aeons form links in the chains that fetter the world and all its souls. Our most basic and holy purpose is to corrupt those links, compromise those chains, and ultimately break them. We will drag every soul screaming into freedom. Few will thank us.

The magician-priests of Egypt’s other gods came for us. They served the glory of the Aeons. We battled for the ethereal paradigm. The shapeshifters came for us, those jackal-headed beasts that stride silently, and the were-cats who claimed lineage with Bast. Their claws and teeth tore our eternal flesh. Their power in the spirit world thwarted our esoteric goals. But for all of this, even sorcerers and shapeshifters grow old and die. Not so with our worst enemies.

The Cult of Isis bestowed the Spell of Life on Horus and his kind, the Shemsu-Heru, the Reborn. The very notion of their palpitating immortality is a taunt to Set and his children. They died. They resurrected over and again. They never grew old, and Horus never forgot or forgave. That is, if you believe in living mummies. I have never seen one.

Kindred love to tell stories that make the ancient world into an ornate chessboard. We are no different. Let me tell you of the game board, the multiple capitals of Egypt and the multiple hands vying for power. Hear how wicked Horus betrayed his country by bringing in Libyan invaders, just to take revenge on us. Therefore, the Setites traveled to Nubia and Assyria and brought invaders of our own. Let us not forget the Third Generation of Caine and the holy war Set declared on them. We feared the Roman Empire and its Malkavian and Ventrue manipulators. We turned Rome against the Brujah of Carthage, that they might destroy each other. The plot backfired. With the embers of Carthage cooling, Rome came for Egypt. We countered with our ghoul agent, Cleopatra. Yes! Every story, every increasingly unlikely detail, is truer than the last. Isn’t it?

Let the Kindred talk long enough, and they will convince you that every human civilization was a sock puppet filled with a cold, pale hand. Of course, all Cainites are liars. Some parasites like to weave grand mythologies to convince themselves that they control every movement of the gargantuan bovine-entities they latch onto.

Still, Rome got its comeuppance in the end. We engineered the decadence that putrefied its heart. Our forked tongues licked the ears of Tiberius and Caligula. Believe that one and I’ll tell you about the time I ghouled Elvis. Factual or not, our version of Caligula’s degradation and fall contains an archetypal truth: decay and entropy is the long game with an inevitability so voracious that it devours empires, the undead, and all manner of immortal things. In time. That is the pattern, the patter, and the mummers play that we performed time and again, on smaller stages, for Kindred and kine. That’s our history on a plate.

Heresy Among Serpents

There are heretics among snakes. Imagine what it takes to blaspheme a blasphemer — to be the baddest Johnny in the apple cart. It is possible. The Clan lacked experience at purging heresy. We were always on the receiving end of persecution. We can be forgiven for being inefficient with the righteous pyre. For all anyone knows, those heretics might be about their business to this very night.

The Children of Judas

Byzantium was an irresistible light, built on religious mania and the mad dream of a powerful Toreador, Ventrue, and Tzimisce triumvirate. The Followers of Set came to Constantinople to test that dream, to defy the will of the Aeons. Moreover, we were invited! Imagine now, the Toreador Methuselah Michael and the Setite Hierophant Khay’tall making a polite wager of faith, as they looked down upon that wondrous city of domes.

Khay’tall went to work. As Michael had taken on the name of an archangel, Constantinople’s Setites called themselves the Children of Judas. In the end, Khay’tall won the wager. However, the victory soured. Someone murdered Khay’tall in some forgotten treachery. Visiting Setites from Egypt discovered the Children of Judas had committed an unforgivable blasphemy, teaching their mortal cultists that Set was not a Dark God but a mere demon in service to Satan. They had forsaken Set for the degeneracy of infernalism. By the time the Hierophants agreed to purge the Children of Judas, the demon-worshipers had already scattered from the broken city, the dust of a dream in their bootprints.

Regarding Dark Gods and Demons

There is a difference between a Dark God and a demon. Enslavement to an evil spirit is a blasphemy to us. We seek to end enslavement of the soul.

In the end, the Aeons want the same thing as any demon. An Aeon might call himself Ra, Jupiter, or Jehovah. Call him hustler. Stand with all the shills, and you’ll get taken in by his card prestidigitation. The hustler works miracles… from that angle. Suppose I sneak behind and hamstring you. You fall to the floor. You scream, but from that new angle, you see the hustler’s double lifts and sleights. You see the lies of the rigged game. You will know agony. You will know enlightenment.

The pleasure promised by Set is not always distinguishable from pain, but he also promises to make you stronger. We are the horrible irritant that forms a black pearl in the mind. Our ends are holy. Our means are as awful as they need to be. Our methods would make a demon shiver.

The Black Magdalene

We were not the only cadavers interested in religion. During the Dark Ages, some Cainites came to see parallels between undeath and Christian doctrine: the incorruptibility of a saint’s flesh after death, for example. They saw Christ as a vampire, the “Second Caine.” So the Cainite Heresy came to be.

Most Setites merely studied or mocked the movement. However, a small segment of the Clan, cut off from Egypt, formed their own cult, distinct from the rest of the Cainite Heresy, called the Church of the Black Magdalene. The heretics presented Setite dogma as the “true doctrine” handed down from the mouth of Christ to the ear of his thirteenth apostle, Mary Magdalene. The teachings were thus: Christ had absolved original sin. The deception of the Aeons, however, fooled mortals into taking on further sins. Arch-Aeon Jehovah used the chief deceptions, Guilt and Law, to ensnare souls and hide the truth. The truth was thus: deeds of the body have no impact on salvation, and any act performed with love and joy is holy.

The Magdalene sisters encouraged mortals to act upon desire, so sin and ask Christ’s forgiveness, until they could forgive themselves and cast off the shackles of shame forever. They emphasized the role of the female in salvation. They persuaded the pious to break vows of celibacy, the audacity of free love and sexuality in the Middle Ages. They claimed Christ fathered a child with Apostle Mary, and took part in more than one Merovingian conspiracy. They might have radically altered the Catholic Church, by sheer weight of converts, had the fires of the Inquisition not risen.

The Inquisition

This next secret is very naughty. Most Kindred do not know it. Hearken closely.

The Followers of Set encouraged the Inquisition.

It was not so difficult. The stage was already set. The Cainites had overextended and overexposed themselves. They over-abused the herd, and it was only the slightest of pushes that precipitated the stampede. The fire. The screams. The scorched-saccharine stink of one’s enemies permeating the night. We sowed dissent among the kine. We gave the locations of secreted havens to the zealots. We offered safety to the elders, and then delivered their day-sleeping bodies to the witch hunters. We enacted Set’s glorious vengeance on the twelve Clans. If we burnt ourselves a little, what of it? It’s still fun to play with fire.

The fire changed Kindred forever. Then came the Masquerade, the Anarch Revolt, and the Sabbat. We went through our own growing pains. The Hierophants lost their singular grip over our doctrine. New paths of philosophy took shape. We spawned new mythologies and sub-mythologies, all under the many masks of Set. Did you know that the Camarilla asked us to join? We were the midwives of modern vampire society, and then we refused to join. If you listen carefully, you can still hear their sigh of relief.

Nineteenth Century and Egyptomania

Imagine coming out of the darkness and into the gaudy light. For centuries, Europeans knew next to nothing about Egypt. Then, Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. In a historical instant, our lore no longer belonged solely to us, but to the world. The Egyptian craze flared. Mortals squealed for mock-Egyptian trinkets and decor.

Picture the hilarity. The Setites of that time, used to skulking in the ghettos and crawly cracks, suddenly found themselves impossibly fashionable. Toreador begged them to come to Elysium, in priestly robes and entwined with a ghoul serpent, speaking of the Dreadful Mysteries and the Dark God. Our religion, once considered a sinister threat, was now droll entertainment.

A mockery? A security breach? Some elders found this all very upsetting. I’d like to think we milked it for all it was worth. Our mythos reentered the communal memory. Our language of symbols spread like contagion. Every counterculture youth wearing a looped cross carries a piece of our glamour. If some pyramid-shaped casino crassly peddles the iconography and mystery of Egypt, well, so do we.

Clan of Faith

The Followers of Set are not just a Clan, but also a religion. Just like every other religion, not every Setite has the same attitude towards the faith. Some are devout, some orthodox, and some focus on the metaphysical to the exclusion of all else.

Some are more casual. Pragmatic. They say an occasional prayer. They go to temple on holy days, and that is the extent. They focus more on the worldly affairs of the Clan.

Some consider “Followers of Set” a quaint, even embarrassing, relic of their lineage. They rebel against the faith. Like any fervent atheist in a religious family, their ceaseless rebellion shows how much of a hold the faith still has upon them.

Not every Follower of Set is even from our blood. We take in converts from the other Clans, from mortal and ghoul cultists, even from other supernaturals. Anyone who is ready, or made ready, to see the truth is welcome. We say “holy war,” and we say “Jyhad.” But our war is spiritual. Not every victory is over an enemy’s corpse. How much better when the enemy joins? Why poke out a blind man’s already useless eyes, when you can make him see what you see?

We emphasize experience over doctrine, as a general thing. The Embrace is the first miracle. It shatters all preconceptions, a total transfiguration of body and soul. It feeds a deep hunger of the soul. We want more. We seek other intense and terrifying spiritual experiences. We strive to grant others the terrible gift of epiphany. Oh, yes. More than anything, we want to share.

Why downplay doctrine? Isn’t that strange? The Followers of Set boast an enormous canon of scripture, chronicles, devotional tracts, liturgies, grimoires, teeming cosmologies, and gospel written by the Dark God himself. We value the act of writing, but we do not worship ink and scrawl. Words only contain the sliver of a truth. You can’t find Godhead in commandments and dogmas. You must feel it. Sense it. Be it.

There are no written exams in the house of the Dark God. The tests are more… visceral.

Factions and Cults

The Setite faith is one of slithering plasticity. It bends and reshapes, takes on the traits of local religions just as much as it infects them. It is less a unified doctrine than it is a framework for generating cults, and the Setite emphasis on personal revelation spawns many cults. Some Setites do not even know the name Set; they identify as a Follower of Typhon or Shiva or some other deity. This does not bother the Dark God’s chosen. They know that what is important is the essence beneath the trappings, Set wears many masks; that the important patterns repeat in variation. Every disparate cult is a piece of the whole, like a composite photo — just squint your eyes and a terrible face emerges.

Sisterhood of Sekhmet

Early in the twentieth century, female Kindred in the Camarilla looked around and saw mostly male Princes. The glass ceiling had persisted, even after death. A coterie of female Setites decided to harness that dissatisfaction. They took on the mask of Sekhmet: fierce lioness, goddess of battle, plague, and healing. They preached female empowerment and packaged the Revelations of the Void as a series of ways of getting in touch with an inner “Lioness Power.” They began a Gehenna cult in the heart of the Camarilla, undermining the sect from within. They recruit disenchanted mortals and the female Kindred of other Clans.

In recent years, Sisterhood finds itself well entrenched in the Camarilla. Its membership even includes a few Princes. Nearly a century of methodical work is coming to fruition. But to what purpose? The Sisterhood is a mystery to the other cults. Some say they are building power in key Camarilla domains, cities containing places of occult importance. Others say they are building enough allies in the Camarilla so that they can defect without fear of reprisal from us. In addition, why are female Kindred of particular importance to their cause? Are the disenfranchised of the Camarilla easier to recruit, or is there some mystical significance?

The Cohort of Wepwawet

The Setite faith is flexible and ever-evolving. Witness the exception that proves the rule, the rare example of fundamentalism. The Cohort of Wepwawet makes grand claims. They say they began as a cult of Warrior Setites devoted to protecting Egypt from southern invaders. They claim their leader is an ancient progeny of Set who slumbers in the Arena of Thunder, their founding temple at Abu Simbel. They claim to follow the “true and ancient Theophidian doctrine.” Maybe those so devoted to the desert storm gods blow a lot of hot air.

Bolstered by rumors that Wepwawet had awakened from torpor in the 1960s, the Cohort launched a revival campaign. All through the ‘70s, they spread their militant orthodoxy. The other cults did not support their open hostility to the other Clans. The Cohort fostered ill will against “Setite fanatics.” They even drove the Serpents of the Light to join the Sabbat. With their credibility in shambles, they shrunk in on themselves.

Wepwawet’s chosen are hungry for victories. They attack other supernaturals they deem minions of the Aeons. They nurture a special vendetta against the Society of Leopold, killing and corrupting its latter-day witch-hunters. Rumors of Wepwawet stirring from torpor again spread. Whether this is true, or a stunt to gain traction among the cults, who can say? However, the Cohort is on the move.

Children of Loki

You laugh. Scandinavian Setites? No joke. Them Vikings, they got around. The name we have is Arnulf Seamundsson. It is not a valid Scandinavian name, so it is either a mistranslation or a pseudonym, but it is all we have. Arnulf was a Norse merchant who encountered the Followers of Set in Alexandria. He didn’t survive the meeting, but he smiled the whole way home. He renamed himself Arnulf Jörmungandrsson. His attempts at building a doomsday cult around the worship of the Midgard Serpent met little success, so he and his childer fell back on the Scandinavian luxury trade. In Christiania (now Oslo), Arnulf’s line grew fat on accrued influence. There is little more interesting to say on the matter... until now. A certain, redheaded childe of Arnulf, one Valdís Hel-Blár, has recently revitalized the cult. Cutting a striking figure, half her face painted corpse-blue, she’s proven much more spiritually successful than her sire. She calls her movement the Children of Loki. Valdís claims that she has reconnected with the teachings of a cult that came to Scandinavia long before Arnulf. The cult fills its mythos with a pantheon of Loki’s monstrous offspring, including the demon-wolf Fenris, the World Serpent Jörmungandr, and half-skeletal Hel. She invokes Loki as a Mask of Set, focusing on the trickster god’s penchant for infiltrating the Aeons, while spreading the seeds of chaos and calling upon chthonic powers to bring about Ragnarök. Her dark zeal makes her materialistic sire uncomfortable, but the Typhonists of the other cults heartily approve.

Cult of Taweret

The Followers of Set are explorers. Some explore forbidden lore that makes occultists quake. Some explore the dark corners of the earth, where the brave fear to tread. Some explore the stygian depths beyond. The cultists of Taweret turn inward, exploring the frontier of sensation — liberation and enlightenment through ecstasy. They read the hieroglyphs written in nerve endings.

This cult claims Set’s childe Taweret, goddess of fertility, childbirth, and black magic, as its patron. Their teachings spread from the Palace of Veils, a Founding Temple beneath the El Kharga oasis. Debauchery is their tool to oppose the Aeons. Some Clan mates consider the Taweretans too self-indulgent. They corrupt souls one at a time, but show uncanny skill in picking just the right target that brings ruination to a larger body.

The Taweretans have a light touch, never working in groups larger than three. The Aeons, they argue, taint any bond not based on personal emotions. In these small units, they follow the Revelations of Ecstasy as their winding route to communion with the Dark God.

Cult of Typhon Trismegistus

Listen now. Once upon a time, Gaia desired revenge on her treacherous grandchildren, the Olympians, for usurping her children, the Titans. She lay with Tartarus — Hell — and he filled her many cavernous wombs with his 1,289 members. That terrible coupling that made the gods tremble spawned Typhon. The Olympians fled the serpent-legged monster, hiding in the forms of animals.

Zeus, taking the form of a ram, became Amon; Hermes, in ibis form, became Thoth, and so on. Thus, the ancient Greeks explained the similarities they saw between their gods and the Egyptians’. Typhon himself they identified with Set. When the Setites came to convert the Greeks and Romans, they found their work already begun.

The Followers of Set first expanded into Europe through the Cult of Typhon Trismegistus. The cult began in Alexandria and spread through the Roman Empire. The Typhonists so dominated the Classical era that it changed the terminology of the Clan forever. That is why we say the Path of Typhon and not of Sutekh.

Typhonists employ an elaborate system of cults within cults. New recruits believe that they join a cult devoted to Bacchus, Mars, or Pluto. Each god represents one aspect of Set: the bringer of ecstatic madness, the warrior, and the lord of the dead. Promising initiates eventually learn that all three gods represent Typhon. Only the most dedicated learn that Typhon himself is a mask, and move on to the more spiritual doctrines of gnosis and overcoming desire. Many do not move past the step of physical debauchery and remain tempters. But they have all of eternity to progress. The true doctrine is not forced upon any vampire not ready to accept it.

Children of Damballah

Set was a king who stole divine power by cutting out and eating the heart of Damballah-Wedo, snake-god of Earth and Darkness. This did not prove fatal to the god, but it angered him and his consort, the Rainbow Serpent Aïda-Wedo. Aïda’s curse banished the king from life and the day, while Damballah’s curse banished him from the peace of the grave, but the two gods could not take back the stolen magic power. The king, however, could share it with others who accepted the curse as its price.

At least, that is how the Children of Damballah tell it. When the Setites spread through sub-Saharan Africa, they established new cults, reconciling Set with various tribal gods. Yoruban Setites invested Set in the person of Damballah-Wedo. The cult based itself in Nigeria and Benin. The high priests steered Damballah to a more sinister light by emphasizing his connection with the dead. Unfortunately, the cult leaders kept Damballah’s connection with Set as a “Great Mystery” that only senior initiates would learn. After centuries of isolation and high priests entering torpor, Yoruba culture washed away most of the Theophidian doctrine. Attempts to bring Damballans back to orthodoxy have failed; they merely take the Egyptian Setite lore and re-work it to fit with their mythology. The parent Clan taught them too well.

Despite the legend of a curse, Damballans revere the Serpent and the Rainbow as the source of their power, with Set forming a junior third in their cult’s trinity. They emphasize the liberating madness of ecstatic trance. The gods may possess entranced worshippers, and in time, the cult promises that initiates may gain enough spiritual power to become gods themselves. These Setites have a more natural skill with preternatural senses and can even see the spirits.

Serpents of the Light

The Cobras resemble the parent Clan in most ways, except the most important. They accept the myth of the Noddists. Where the Theophidians desire their god-king to rise and devour, the Cobras oppose the Antediluvians, including Set. To the orthodox Setites, this is blasphemy.

The Serpents of the Light began as an offshoot of the West African Cult of Damballah, already a distant offshoot of the Typhonist beliefs, before drifting even further away. Rumor says the Cobras share their West African cousins’ talent with mystical senses and communing with spirits. Their spirituality is steeped in Voudon, and they borrow from other Afro-Caribbean cults — filching the gods, loa, and saints of other faiths to weave their own complicated mythos. Eventually, that convoluted pantheon eclipsed Set. Only the spirits matter.

Now, the Cobras serve not one central theological figure, but entire courts of loa. Gaining the favor of such a diverse group of beings involves many strange and sometimes contradictory tasks. What do these spirits want? Who can guess? The enigmatic Cobras walk with one foot in this world and one in the next.

Is that all bullshit? I hear tell of strange and unfortunate coincidences befalling those who harass the Cobras. Things go wrong. Odd faces stare back at the offender from the mirror. Something watches over them.

Seeking the spiritual freedom they could not find with the parent Clan, the Serpents of the Light joined the Sabbat. They serve as mystics for the Sword of Caine. Creators of cults and peddlers of mortal desire, the Cobras are often more handy at dealing with the kine than the average Sabbat monster.

Some of the other Setite cults might forgive the Cobras (the Cohort of Wepwawet has lost face since their persecution of the Cobras), but their defection to the Sabbat angered many of the Clan, and the bitterness is still fresh. The Cobras eschew most of the Paths of Enlightenment taught by the parent Clan, though some still practice a version of the Path of Ecstacy.

Daitya

Witness the holy blasphemers. Their origin story comes in a pair. The first says the Followers of Set traveled east in the Hellenistic age, trailing the armies of Alexander. Into their own mythology, they absorbed Shiva the Destroyer, Rudra the god of storms and hunters, and the serpent-demon Vritra. The bloodline evolved. The worship of Set faded away. They called themselves “Daitya” after the legendary race of cosmic demons who fought the Hindu gods.

The second story does not deny that Greco-Egyptian Setites came to India, but insists the Daitya were already stalking the night there millennia before Alexander. It was this vampire Clan who gave their name to the mythical demons. The Daitya concede that the Greco-Egyptian Setites renewed contact between the Clan’s eastern and western wings. But who came first?

Regardless of which story is true, the Daitya are one of the most exalted Clans in India. They believe crimes in their past lives preordained their Embrace. They consider themselves demons, but even demons have their castes and caste duties. As demons, they must confound the gods and strive to overthrow the moral order of the world. As Brahmins, they must strive to keep their fellow vampires within their own particular caste duties as murderers, tricksters, and desecrators of sacred rites. If a vampire suffers Final Death, having fulfilled her demonic caste duty, she might win a higher place in the next life.

The Daitya worship Shiva, whose purviews include sex, death, and madness. When Shiva opens his third eye, he annihilates whatever he sees. When the world reaches an absolute nadir of depravity, Shiva will look upon the whole universe with his third eye.

Tlacique

Witness the servants of the sun. The Conquistador Kindred came to the New World hungry for fresh land and blood. Imagine the surprise that wormed through their moldy hearts when they found vampires there already: Nosferatu, Gangrel, and a bloodline calling itself the Tlacique. Was this last a new Clan? There was no hint of them, not in all of the old writings, and these native vampires were already ancient and powerful.

The Tlacique claimed descent from the Aztec god of night and black magic. The European Kindred assumed this Tezcatlipoca must be a Methuselah parent of a very old bloodline, perhaps of the Gangrel or even the Followers of Set. What impressed the Old World Kindred was how the Tlacique lived. They did not merely influence the mortals they found there, but ruled openly as gods, in a manner not heard of since Carthage. The cults of sacrifice. The rivers of ecstatic blood. Imagine!

They are the children of a god, reflections of the Smoking Mirror. They believed this set them above both mortal and vampire. They believed their rituals and consumption of blood kept the sun alive and in motion. They had a place in the cosmic drama. Unlike the Followers of Set, their divine progenitor was never cast out.

These elder blood gods made cautious negotiations with the newcomers. The Camarilla might have gained an eighth Clan except for their greed. We all know what the Conquistadors did to the natives. The Tlacique then got into bed with the Sabbat. Well, that didn’t work out. The Sabbat loves blood rituals, but they miss the spiritual meaning. The Tlacique protect a divine order and the Sabbat opposes that very order. The Sword of Caine decimated the children of Tezcatlipoca.

They are scattered, but some few remain. Hidden, they unite and rebuild power. They spread from Central to South and North America. They dig up the sleeping elders not devoured by the Sabbat, and they Embrace new childer. We befriend them when we can. We share a love of dark secrets and primal sorcery. We aid and urge them on to revenge. The Sabbat has something nasty at their throat, and they don’t even know it. We certainly won’t tell them.

Warrior Setites

We say that the Warriors of Set are descended from Set’s childe, Wepwawet. This is not a literal truth, but a statement of ideal. They are not even a true bloodline. A Setite who espouses this ideal, usually through training in the Path of the Warrior, may gain great physical strength at the expense of walking unseen. Their progeny, properly trained, may also receive this strength passed on to them. Supernatural nature, changed purely by intent. Proof that the Dark God gives us the gifts He needs us to have.

The Cohort of Wepwawet once claimed the majority of Warrior Setites, but they have since spread. Some form their own tiny cults. The Cult of Typhon Trismegistus contains an important minority of Warrior Setites who devote their worship of Set to his Mask as the Roman god Mars.