“Within its own "world view" Egyptian hkꜢ was of far more exalted significance than its Coptic descendant or Western approximation. Amoral and quintessentially effective, a power to which gods, men, and all of nature were subject, it was still the same force whether used by god, king, priest, private individual, rebel, or foreign enemy, whether hostile or beneficent, sanctioned or suppressed. As the pre-eminent force through which the creator engendered and sustained the ordered cosmos, it was necessarily the dynamic "energy" which Egyptian religious ritual sought to channel that it might effect its identical goal, the preservation of the creator's universe. The cultic manipulation of this "energy" by recitation, substance, and ritual thus constituted a sophisticated system of "practical theology," a "theurgy" in which the priest quite literally "performed the works of god.”