DAJ

“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.”
― Robert K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice

“Fundamentalism, in whatever form, solves no problems but only suppresses them. We must not succumb to the temptation that from time to time emerges from it and its apparently simple and clear solutions. With its intolerance, it can have no future: things must not be reduced to a single, isolated principle, be it ever so noble and elevated. Always and above all, the whole is at stake.”
― Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light

“Inexorably history destroys all 'eternal' and 'absolute' values and demonstrates the relativity of every absolute point of reference which we seek to establish. Hence the fanatical opposition to anything historical—or scorn for it which takes the form of unscrupulous distortion—on the part of those who wish to establish definitive, binding norms.”
― Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many

“One sometimes notes in the research certain evasive strategies designed to avoid the conclusion that the notion of dying and rising deities might be a pre-Christian phenomenon. Ancient Near Eastern gods are freely granted the privilege of rising or returning—as long as they behave like gentlemen and do not do so before Christ.”
― Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East