It is the eternal contest between the material and the spiritual that was to the Indian an omnipresent prepossession. Through the powerful theocratic organization of the community in its social as well as in its hieratic aspects, and by the songs and prayers of a hoary antiquity, the whole year is a complex of ceremonies. This is more especially the case in the maize-growing countries. From birth to death the Indians were aware of mysterious environing forces, some beautiful and fortune-bringing, others inimical and disastrous. To the end that life should be made endurable, a large number of esoteric organizations was everywhere established, each of which employed a special ritual at an appointed time. Among the Keres, there were originally four such priesthoods,[206] but the march of modern ideas has gradually eliminated some of these in certain of the villages. Highest of these groups were the Ya-Ya (mothers) to which the caciques belonged; then came the medicine men, the warriors, and the hunters. Frazer points out that in the most primitive societies the practice of magic was for individual gain, but that, as community life evolved, it was employed for the benefit of the tribe. Sacrifice and prayer were the means by which the gods, the personal agents of elemental forces, were induced to bestow favors upon the whole people. Consequently it signified a great advance in social progress when a class of magic-practising men was set apart to bring prosperity to their tribe, whether this was for the control of the weather, and so indirectly for the increase of foods, or for the healing of diseases. Although everywhere these priests were given terrible power, often ruthlessly exercised, they were, take it all in all, productive of incalculable good to humanity. They were the direct predecessors of our physicians and surgeons, of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.[207] The entire highly complicated program as practised by the Pueblo Indian may be summed up as a system of religious ideas which have as their objective counterparts bundles of fetishes, which help to serve the good of the clan, or fraternity, or community at large. According to Kroeber, “Among the Pueblos each priest is the curator of a sacred object or fetish, carefully bundled and preserved.” The mere display of these objects upon an altar made of meal or sand is a prayer to “those above.” The fetishes may not themselves be thought of as divine, but they do represent something of the same concept as does the crucifix above the High Altar of the Roman church. And they have the direct quality, as medicine-objects, of bringing succor to those in distress. To quote Kroeber once more: It looks therefore as if the American priesthood had originated in association with these two ceremonial traits of the fetish bundle and the painted altar—both conspicuously unknown in the Eastern hemisphere.[208]