THE CULT OF THE DEAD +350+. In the history of religion the veneration of the dead, as is remarked above, is more widely diffused and more effective than that of the living. We may distinguish between the cult of known historical persons after death (which is closely related to that of living men), the deification of mythical ancestors, and the worship of ghosts. +351+. _Historical persons._ In simple communities commanding personalities that have impressed the imagination of the people by proofs of power and by conferring benefits on communities may not unnaturally receive divine honors after death. Lyall reports a case of this sort in recent times: the French officer Raymond in Hyderabad is said to have been worshiped as a god.[648] Other cases are reported as occuring in Samoa and in India.[649] Rivers mentions traditions among the Todas of Southern India which, he thinks, may vouch for the worship of gods who were originally men, but implicit reliance cannot be placed on such traditions.[650] Two apparently definite instances of deification are given by Ellis,[651] both of cruel kings (one dethroned in 1818), to whom temples with complete rituals are dedicated; but the deification in one of these cases (and probably in the other) was a deliberate act of political leaders, and not a product of spontaneous popular feeling. Two other local gods mentioned by Ellis were, according to the tradition, two men who began the trade that made Whydah the chief port of the west coast of Africa; but here also the tradition is not perfectly trustworthy. +352+. Egyptian kings were regularly deified after death, being identified with Osiris; their cult, though not equal in sanctity to that of the gods proper, was still prominent and important.[652] It is probably to be regarded as a revision and magnification of the cult of the dead kin, combined with the desire to honor great representative men. No such custom is known to have existed among Semitic peoples, by whom a sharp distinction was made between the divine and the human. In India it was chiefly the ascetic sages that were religiously eminent, and in the prevailing pantheistic system these (as is remarked above), absorbing the divine essence, sometimes became as powerful as gods, but passed after death into the cosmic All, and remained human. The Mazdean faith, like the Israelite, made it impossible to accept a deceased man as a god.