This research examines elements of Egyptian culture that seem closer to magic than to religion as they are commonly understood. Any discussion of Egyptian religion and magic must be prefaced by a caution against a bias, particularly a western bias, that positions the conventions of modern, particularly western, religion as evaluative of the inferiority of magic to it. According to Ritner, this was more or less the attitude adopted by scholarship of an earlier period, notably by Frazer in The Golden Bough, "assuming distinctions between magic and religion because we in the West have made such a distinction." More than this, Ritner cites a tendency of Western scholars of Egypt to frame the distinction in a way that privileges the religious practice of Judaeo-Christian culture in the West. But the bright line between magic and religion that appears in the West does not appear to have been the dominant operation in ancient Egypt. In the Egyptian case, indeed, the term magic is not associated with tricks and illusions but rather with the issues of high religious seriousness, such as a fundamental universal creative principle:
At the beginning of time, before the creation of the world, the creator conceived in his heart the force of hkr, at once creative logos and source of all cosmic dynamics . . . [which] became embodied as a divine personality, Heka.
Ritner cites a passage from the Coffin Text Spell 26 attributed to Heka: "I am he whom the Unique Lord made before duality had yet come into being. I am the son of Him who gave birth to the universe." This suggests that magic is primordial and cosmic for ancient Egypt, possessed of a divinity that precedes and enables (mere) religion, which is the province of humanity, and that "animates" the "consecrated imagery" of ritual observance. In Western lines of thought, religion supplants primordial magic as primitive and unconsecrated. The Egyptian designation, however, helps explain why ...