Michael Aquino

The Temple of Set was originally thought to take the context of what our original Satanic experience had been out of the Judeo-Christian mythology system.

And harking back to the original Church of Satan days, we were looking really to find the nature of what is generally called the human soul.

In other words, what it is within us that animates us, that gives us freedom of decision, of conceptualization, the intellectual life force.

The Church of Satan, of course, had a certain social criticism aspect to it, and it also liked to hold Judeo-Christianity's feet to the fire.

After 10 years, both of those became sort of played out, and we were looking, as Obi-Wan Kenobi suggested to Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie, to take a first step into a larger universe.

So the Temple of Set...

exists to explore the self, the personality, and we do this through the media of ancient Egyptian religion, which we found to be the most sophisticated.

So what you see in the Temple of Set is not anything with an agenda towards good or evil per se, but rather towards understanding consciousness, and once you understand consciousness, to maximize your personal use of it,

in such a way that you are not the slave to conventions or to propaganda of any sort for that matter, so that you are in effect a god yourself, responsible for your own decisions concerning matters of good or evil or morality.