Forum 2.0

As many of you guys well know, religion always has a magical side to it. More so among the ancient Egyptians who believed that it was magic that created the universe...that all was animated by a mysterious spell. This comes to the conclusion that magic to these people were older even than their gods and thus are consequently more powerful.

I am one with Atum when he still floated alone in Nun, the waters of chaos, before any of his strength had gone into creating the cosmos. I am Atum at his most inexhaustible - the potence and potential of all that is to be. This is my magic protection and it's older and greater than all the gods together! - The Book of The Dead

The means that one should acquire what they want through ancient magic was also incredible, well in our point of view. In their view of the world and how they learned from it, it was possible to implore, negotiate, threaten, and beg the dead, the gods, demons, and other manner of spiritual beings. Magic was accepted by everyone in their society and was treated as something that was real, possible, and fathomable...an everyday part of their lives.

At their time, magic was deemed to have made sense and was the practical way of doing stuff. Due to this perception, many a mortal Egyptian somehow wanted to learn the mystic arts and went about doing it in various, and probably to us, dubious means.

Old Kingdom kings for example did the following:

The king orders sacrifices, he alone controls them,
the king eats humans, feeds on gods,
he has them presented on an altar to himself,
he has agents to do his will. He fires off the orders! 
............ 
The king eats their magic, he gulps down their souls,
the adults he has for breakfast,
the young are lunch,
the babies he has for supper,
the old ones are too tough to eat, he just burns them on the altar as an offering to himself.

So, what we can surmise from the text above was that if you consumed someone, you can absorb his or her power. Aside from the rather grotesque method suggested above, others of a more scholarly mode read and reread magic from writing as it is known that a lot of magic to the ancient Egyptians were found and bound in their papyrus and hieroglyphs.