Once upon a time.
The Egyptian sage Ptah-hotep once said in his Maxims,"Think of living in peace with what you possess, and whatever the Gods choose to give will come of its own accord."
Does this also apply to the gods themselves, who have lost the power to give themselves anything?
Reading something about Ramses II made me ache for the days of the pharaonic institution. I do not delude myself into thinking it was a Golden Age for men; humans have changed little (though at least they tried to uphold the Rule of Ma'at), although we certainly had better architecture back then if I may say so. But it was certainly a golden era for gods; men's minds were more fertile, rich in the power of belief. It doesn't matter if the belief in the gods came first or if the gods came first; we sustained them and they sustained us. I protected Pharaoh and Pharaoh worshipped me.
The sun was rolled across the sky by Khepera in the form of a dung-beetle, it was the blazing right Eye of Ra, it was the solar disc on the head of Ra sailing across the sky in the Barque of Ages, the life-giving sun-disc Aton; it was all these and more, and it would cease to rise if Ma'at was no longer respected. And it has ceased to rise. What rises now is a ball of flaming gas, not the same sun that the people of the Nile Delta once saw.
The pharaohs I watched over are not dead, not completely, but they are little more than ghosts. Their names live on in papyri and stone, but few can read them. Everyone knows Ramses II and Akhenaton and Tutankhamun; how many know Pepy I and Senwosret I-III? How many people look at statues of the gods, or temples, and see a civilisation's faith instead of historical or architectural curiosities?
I am a protective goddess, but there is little left to protect, and even less belief in me.