The Pyramid Texts run creation on three personified faculties: Sia, wisdom, the concept formed in the heart; Hu, authoritative utterance, the word spoken by the tongue; Heka, the power that breaks resistance to the spoken word. The Memphite theology compresses it further: Ptah conceives in the heart and speaks, and the world executes. Spell 261 has the magician invoke Heka, raise himself to the god's level, and become him: Heka existed before anything else was created, even before the gods, first-born of Atum, son of the primordial matrix. In the Amduat's seventh hour, Heka is the power by which Apep is defeated nightly. The justified dead bear the epithet just of voice: their hearts conceived only true words.
Egyptian ceremonialism's own doctrine: the magical actions were important but absolutely impotent without the words necessary to empower them; deities would not send their doubles if the priests did not know what to say. The redaction history shows the anxiety: the Heliopolitan scheme kept Heka separate as protection of the word; the Memphites made Heka inherent in the word itself, a theological upgrade that removed the middleman. Every later Western magic system, Hermeticism, the Golden Dawn, Thelema, is fan fiction of this schema with the footnotes removed.
The claim: read functionally, Heka is not magic but the social physics that makes utterances bind, the difference between a word and a law, a prayer and a program; the Egyptians gave a god's name to what Austin called felicity and what states call force: the power standing behind the sentence. Verdict: the texts support it eerily well, Heka protects the utterance from resistance, which is precisely what institutions do for their declarations. The archive's note: every era has a Heka. Ours wears a badge, a blue checkmark, or a network switch. The words are free. The heka is priced.
If the magic is in the word, why did the priest need to become the god to say it?