Hi Mogg, (slowly catching up on email on my *new* computer...blew the old
one up...)

You said...
>>Ritner (the author of a prize winning book on the mechanics of egyptian
>>magick) says that in the Egyptian context, its study has not been well
>>served by anthropologists such as Malinowski<<

Corect me if I'm wrong, but isn't Ritner's book "The Mechanics of Egyptian Religion"? or is it "Egyptian Magic"? (You're probably right). Only asking because the word 'magic' in the title piqued my interest. Yesterday in my lecture on Ancient Magic, at Uni, the lecturer said that to call Pharaonic-era Egyptian religion
"magic" was erroneous, that 'Heka' - the Egyptian word usually translated as 'Magic' really meant something in the order of 'the force that animated the
Gods and everything else' a divine force that was not actually 'magic(k)al', that 'magic' was a bad translatuion of Heka - as in say Geraldine Pinch's
book "Egyptian Magic" she talks about the problem of calling Heka Magic, but then goes on to use the 'm' word throughout her book. Apparently it wasn't
really correct to equate Egyptian religious technology with magic until the Hellenistic period.

~Caroline.