“No Egyptian deity ever became the principle of evil, but one god, Seth, displays the destructive element more than the others. . . . Seth was a god of the dry, arid south, where the red deserts stretched lifeless to the rocky, burning mountains on the horizon. Because of Seth’s association with the desert, he was usually portrayed as a reddish animal of unknown identity, and redhaired people were considered in some special way his own.”

—Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.