As Diodorus remarks, so evenly ordered was their whole manner of life that it was as if arranged by a learned physician rather than by a lawgiver.
Two world-wide modes of practice found their earliest illustration in ancient Egypt.

Magic, the first of these, represented the attitude of primitive man to nature, and really was his religion.

He had no idea of immutable laws, but regarded the world about him as changeable and fickle like himself, and "to make life go as he wished, he must be able to please and propitiate or to coerce these forces outside himself."(8) (8) L.Thorndike: The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe, New York, 1905, p.

29.
The point of interest to us is that in the Pyramid Texts--"the oldest chapter in human thinking preserved to us, the remotest reach in the intellectual history of man which we are now able to discern"(9)--one of their six-fold contents relates to the practice of magic.

A deep belief existed as to its efficacy, particularly in guiding the dead, who were said to be glorious by reason of mouths equipped with the charms, prayers and ritual of the Pyramid Texts, armed with which alone could the soul escape the innumerable dangers and ordeals of the passage through another world.