Funeral ceremonies were not recognized as having anything to do with the older Shinto. It avoided everything connected with death, which was regarded as a source of pollution. Not until the revolution of 1868 was there instituted an authorized form of Shinto burial.[37] =Deified Classes of Men=.--In the older Shinto this category of deities had more importance than it has at present. Several of the pseudo-ancestors are in reality deified types, analogous to such conceptions as Tommy Atkins or Mrs. Grundy. As a general rule they have two aspects, one as man-Gods, and another as satellites of the Sun-Goddess, a nature deity. They are more particularly described in a later chapter. =Deities of Human Qualities=.--As might be expected, Shinto has comparatively few deities of this class. It is represented by the Gods of Pestilence, of Good and Ill Luck, the phallic deities, and the _oni_, or demons of disease. Such deified abstractions as the Fates, the Furies, Old Age, Time, Themis, Fear, Love, &c., are conspicuously absent. It will be observed that both of the two great currents of religion-making thought are concerned in the evolution of the last two categories of man-deities. They involve not only the exaltation of human types and qualities to the rank of divinity, but the personification of these general and abstract conceptions. This complication indicates that they belong to a secondary stage of development. Ta-jikara no wo (hand-strength-male), for example, is not a primary deity of the Japanese Pantheon. He is little more than an ornamental adjunct to the myth of the Sun-Goddess. It may be gathered from the myths of the _Kojiki_ and _Nihongi_ that the phallic deities--personifications of lusty animal vigour--were at first mere magical appliances, which were afterwards personified and raised to divine rank. It was a personified human abstraction--namely, Psyche, who was described by Keats as The latest born and loveliest by far Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy. Mnemosyne, Styx, and all the numerous deified abstractions of humanity in Greek mythology are obviously of later origin than Gaia and Ouranos, or even Zeus and Here. It is on the narrow basis of these two secondary classes of conceptions that Comte strove to establish his Religion of Humanity. But it is difficult to conceive how on Positivist principles Humanity, whether we regard it as a class or as a quality, could have a sentient existence or transcendent power, without a combination of which there can be no deity and no religion, properly so called. His worship of deceased individual men is open to the same objection. Comte's recognition of nature-deities is brief and contemptuous. He allows a certain reverence to the Sun and Earth as "fetishes."[38]