"Lords of the Underworld: Set and Ti-Tsang" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Complete Encyclopedia of Egyptian Deities"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 15
Lords of the Underworld: Set and Ti-Tsang
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In one
telling, a god tears himself violently from his mother’s womb rather than wait
for a natural birth, arriving into the world already the god of storms,
deserts, and disorder. In another, a young woman descends voluntarily into hell
itself, searching the courts of the dead for a mother she fears is lost there,
and emerges having sworn never to rest until every last suffering soul is
freed. Today, by the reckoning of more than a few modern pagan calendars, both
stories are being celebrated at once: the birth of the Egyptian god Set, and
the underworld-saving vow of the Chinese bodhisattva Ti-Tsang.
Both
figures are genuinely ancient, genuinely major, and genuinely fascinating.
Neither one, as far as this column has been able to determine, has anything to
do with July 15th—and for two completely different reasons, which makes today
less a story about one broken date than about two different ways a calendar can
quietly come apart from the tradition it claims to summarize...
The God Who Tore Himself Free
Set (also
rendered as “Seth,” “Setesh,” or “Sutekh”) is one of the oldest and most
structurally important deities in the Egyptian pantheon: god of the desert, of
storms, of foreign lands, and of the disorder that exists in necessary tension
with civilization. Egyptian mythology gave him a genuinely startling origin. He
was one of five children born to the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb,
delivered not across an ordinary calendar year but during the five epagomenal days—a
mythic solution to a real astronomical problem. The Egyptian civil calendar ran
360 days, twelve months of thirty, which left five days unaccounted for against
the true solar year. Over the centuries, myth filled the gap: Nut, forbidden by the sun god Ra from giving birth on any of the year’s
official days, enlisted Thoth to win her five additional days in a game of
chance, and used them to deliver Osiris, Horus the Elder,
Set, Isis, and Nephthys in turn. Set was born on the
third of these days, and ancient tradition remembered it as the unluckiest of
the five—some sources describe him tearing his own way out of his mother’s side
rather than waiting to be born, an act of violent impatience that Egyptian
storytellers clearly felt suited him.
That violence defined the rest of his mythology: Set murdered and dismembered his brother Osiris out of jealousy, setting off the entire cycle of death, mourning, and resurrection that made Osiris the god of the afterlife in the first place—and setting up decades of mythic conflict with Osiris’s son, Horus, for the throne of Egypt. Yet Set was never simply a villain. He rode in the sun barque alongside Ra each night, spearing the chaos-serpent Apep before it could swallow the sun, and Egyptian temples in the eastern desert venerated him directly as a legitimate, necessary god of the wild places civilization hadn’t reached. Modern Kemetic practitioners, following that older complexity rather than a simplified villain narrative, generally honor him as a god of primal strength and necessary disruption—chaos not as evil, but as the force civilization must occasionally reckon with in order to stay honest.
Yet, herein lies the trouble: nobody, ancient or modern, agrees on which day of the modern calendar corresponds to the third epagomenal day—and the disagreement runs surprisingly deep even within the community that celebrates it. The ancient Egyptian civil calendar had no leap-year correction, so it drifted steadily against the true solar year, a full day every four years, completing an entire 1,460-year cycle before realigning with the seasons. There is, quite literally, no single fixed Gregorian date that the epagomenal days ever consistently corresponded to across Egyptian history—the answer depends on which century of the civil calendar you’re asking about. Most contemporary Kemetic reconstructionists sidestep that problem by anchoring the epagomenal days to something astronomically real rather than the drifting civil calendar: the heliacal rising of Sirius, the star the Egyptians called Sopdet, whose reappearance in the dawn sky historically coincided with the Nile’s annual flood and the Egyptian new year.
By that reckoning, the epagomenal days fall in late July (commonly the 26th through the 31st) putting Set’s birthday around the 29th, not the 15th. Even that consensus is thinner than it looks: browse Kemetic blogs and devotional calendars for more than a few minutes and you’ll find practitioners earnestly correcting one another in the comments, one insisting the real date is July 29th, another countering that it’s actually December 29th, using a different, older reckoning entirely. If the practitioners who observe this holiday every year haven’t settled on a single date for it, a generic wheel-of-the-year list confidently assigning it to July 15th isn’t drawing on a deeper authority—it’s more of a symbolic timeframe in which to pay respects and worship.
Ti-Tsang’s Vow … and a Very Different Kind of Calendar Problem
Ti-Tsang—known
in Sanskrit as Kshitigarbha, “Earth Store,” and in Japan as Jizō—occupies a
role in Chinese Buddhism roughly comparable to what a Western tradition might
call a saint of the damned. According to the Sutra of the Past Vows of
Earth Store Bodhisattva, he lived a previous life as a Brahmin
girl known as the “Braman Maiden,” or “Sacred
Girl,” whose mother died having spoken ill of the “Three Jewels of Buddhism”
and was condemned to hell as a result. Sacred Girl sold everything she owned to
make offerings on her mother’s behalf, descended into the underworld itself
searching for her, and upon learning her mother had already been freed through
the merit of those offerings, swore an almost unbearable vow in response: that
she would not accept Buddhahood herself until every last being trapped in hell
had been liberated first. “If I do not go to hell to help the suffering beings
there,” his vow is traditionally rendered, “who else will go?” Ti-Tsang is
consequently depicted overseeing the courts of the Chinese underworld—the Ten
Kings of Hell famously shown standing in deference before him—not as its ruler
so much as its advocate, permanently on the side of whoever is currently
suffering there.
Ti-Tsang’s actual feast day is real, specific, and well documented: the thirtieth day of the seventh lunar month in the Chinese calendar, immediately following the far larger Zhongyuan, or “Hungry Ghost Festival,” on the fifteenth day of that same month. Together they cap an entire “Ghost Month,” during which the gates between the living and the dead are traditionally understood to stand open, and Buddhist temples across the Chinese-speaking world hold observances specifically for the benefit of the deceased. The trouble with attaching that observance to July 15th is not a matter of scholarly disagreement, as with Set; it’s a category error. The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, meaning its months are pinned to the moon’s phases rather than a fixed solar date, so the seventh lunar month migrates across the Gregorian calendar from year to year. In most years it lands in August or September, not July at all; in 2026 specifically, it doesn’t begin until well past the date this column is publishing on. Assigning Ti-Tsang’s festival, or the Ghost Festival that precedes it, to a fixed July date isn’t choosing between competing traditions the way the Set question is; rather, it’s applying an entirely different kind of calendar’s math to a date that was never meant to hold still.
What both cases share, in the end, is a lesson this column keeps rediscovering: a wheel-of-the-year list that assigns a fixed, tidy Gregorian date to every deity worth naming is optimizing for convenience, not accuracy—smoothing over exactly the kind of calendrical complexity, whether a 1,460-year drift or a moving lunar month, that made these traditions rich enough to be worth studying honestly in the first place. Set’s violent, necessary chaos and Ti-Tsang’s unbearable, voluntary vow don’t need a shared July date to sit meaningfully side by side; they need, if anything, to be read on their own terms, on whatever day each tradition actually keeps.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern
Occultist is proud to present today’s "Daily Occult Review"
from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of
two very different lords of the dark and the dead...
The Complete
Encyclopedia of Egyptian Deities
By Dr. Tamara L. Siuda |
Llewellyn Worldwide
Siuda—herself
a practicing Kemetic priestess as well as a scholar—profiles more than a
hundred deities of the Egyptian pantheon, Set included, with the specific
virtue this column needed most this week: entries that include festival dates
and worship history alongside myth, rather than myth alone. Her treatment of
Set resists the easy villain reading in favor of the older, more complicated
Egyptian understanding of him as necessary chaos, a desert god civilization
needed rather than one it simply feared. For any reader who wants the
epagomenal birth story straight from a source that takes both the mythology and
the modern devotional calendar seriously, this is the reference to keep close
at hand.
(Every day, Modern Occultist
News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily
Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals,
breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric
traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to
cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern
occultists everywhere.)
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