But besides the difficulty of accurately distinguishing between the forms and functions of the different Semitic deities {207}which even their votaries must have felt from the beginning, there was a superadded difficulty in the developed creed, due to the superposition of elemental mysticism and nature-worship upon the primitive cult of ancestral ghosts as gods and goddesses. Just as Ra, the sun, was identified in the latest ages with almost every Egyptian god, so solar ideas and solar myths affected at last the distinct personality of almost every Semitic deity. The consequence is that all the gods become in the end practically indistinguishable: one is so like the other that different interpreters make the most diverse identifications, and are apparently justified in so doing (from the mythological standpoint) by the strong solar or elemental family likeness which runs through the whole pantheon in its later stages. It has even been doubted by scholars of the older school whether Jahweh is not himself a form of his great rival Baal: whether both were not at bottom identical--mere divergent shapes of one polyonymous sun-god. To us, who recognise in every Baal the separate ghost-god of a distinct tomb, such identification is clearly impossible. To the worshippers of the Baalim or of Jahweh themselves, however, these abstruser mythological problems never presented themselves. The difference of name and of holy place was quite enough for them, in spite of essential identity of attribute or nature. They would kill one another for the sake of a descriptive epithet, or risk death itself rather than offer up sacrifices at a hostile altar. Nevertheless, various influences conspired, here as elsewhere, to bring about a gradual movement of syncretism--that is to say, of the absorption of many distinct gods into one; the final identification of several deities originally separate. What those influences were we must now briefly consider.