The Mononymous Setken [A Setken genesis story]

The artist completing the 2021 painting I Had Not Seen Truth Before The Images Of The Gods Were Born

Thanks to the wonderful article in The Age newspaper last month, my name was under the spotlight. I have long been asked about my strange sounding and (when spelled in hieroglyphs) looking name. Here for the first time is what the name means, why I use it, and how it came to be.

Name Change

Changing one’s name to alter one’s impact is nothing new. Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson. Elton John was born Reg Dwight.

In 1987 as I was about to graduate from Drama School, a mystagogue discussed numerology[1] with me, and I thought about the numbers that equated with the letters of my name. This was the first time I had really thought about my name as it appears publicly.

Later I learned that the Ancient Egyptians considered the name an important part of soul anatomy. They referred to it as the “ren”.

I think their idea of the ren can be conflated with our modern idea of ego or personality, and it eventually led to my adopting my name, Setken.

Setken means “to dazzle” and I settled upon this name over a decade ago after discussions with Egyptologist and friend Dr. Tamara Siuda. Later, one of my paintings was to appear in her spectacular volume The Complete Encyclopedia of Egyptian Deities. More on that at the end of this post.

Delineations

At the time I took the name of Setken, I was at the peak of a career in the fitness industry. I wanted to allow my artistic urges full realisation and felt that I wanted to paint, act, sing and write under a new name that served to distinguish between the two careers.

In actuality, it’s not as though the two were separate: I am the one person after all. However, the line I drew between them by adopting a name reflective of the important new paths that I was treading meant I could fully grow into it, and that I did not need to mix the two publicly unless I wished to.

Meanwhile, the fitness side that included grinding fitness classes and my bodybuilding background[2] sat alongside my sensitive artistic nature and does reveal itself in paintings across my career.

The cartouche

My name and the cartouche rendered in hieroglyphs is a registered trademark. I decided to take that step very early on in my painting career. It is my logo, brand, and signature.

The first character of the four at the front is a traditional seated version of an Ancient Egyptian deity and in this case it is the Netjer Set, providing the first of the two syllables in my name.

The circle with the horizontal lines is considered by Egyptology to be a placenta and is the “k” sound, whilst the wavy line of water is the “n”. Those two characters provide the second syllable.

The seated man at the end lets the reader know the name is of a man (me), and we know it’s a name because it’s in an eternity ring that the Ancient Egyptians called a shen. We call it a cartouche thanks to French soldiers equating it with the similar shape of their gun cartridges!

A mono render of my painting Winged Set

The Netjer Set

Set is a god of the Egyptian pantheon. He is considered a 3rd generation Netjer in the grand scheme of the genesis of the multiple gods known to the Ancient Egyptians.

Born of the sky goddess Nut and the earth god Geb, He and His four siblings are amongst the better known of the pantheon thanks to interest taken in Their mythos by Greek traveller writers later in Egypt’s history.

In antiquity he was conflated with the Greek god Typhon by both Greeks and Romans.

Set is also known as Sutekh, Setesh, Suti and Seth.

Pharaoh Seti 1st, father of Ramesses 2nd, took Set’s name as part of his, as did later successors Seti 2nd and Setnakht.

The cartouches of pharaohs throughout history containing Set, alongside mine in the centre; Tag 2023

His iconography is curious to us in that we cannot identify the animal that is his theophany, the creature the ancients called sha.

The sha animal featured in my painting Seventeen Divine Shau III

The sha is Set’s principal theophany, but there are other animals that He is associated with too, including the hippopotamus, panther, giraffe, oryx, pig, donkey and falcon.

He is god of storms, god of the desert, god of red things, and boundaries.

He is the divine executioner. He is the divine adversary. He is great of strength, and great of magick.

He is not equated to or with the modern and relatively recent conception of Satan.

Setken: a multi discipline creative

I happen to be across painting and writing as my primary disciplines, although my training as an actor has come in handy recently with a role in Worm Pornography last year and in presenting my talks about Mr. Syme’s tomb.

Promotional still from the short film Worm Pornography, 2024

Not everyone “gets” the mononym. When I sent the press release out to newspapers in the Mornington Peninsula about the aforementioned painting in Dr. Siuda's encyclopedia (featuring the beachside suburb of Sorrento) I got an email back from one that read: “Can you please let me know your given names? You can send me a quote explaining your reasons for using Setken in the article.”

In Kemetic thought, incorporating the name of a deity into one's own was believed to imbue great power and magick from that deity.

A sterling silver, ruby eyed sha made by Baaba Heru

[1] A system of divination whereby letters are assigned a numeric value with specific numbers being aligned to destiny, traits or certain outcomes

[2] See my blog post Your Shape Is Distinct