There is scarcely any limit to the fetishes that exist, for they are mediators between men and the deified animal or object which each particular fetish represents, and they are therefore an essential accompaniment of all dances, or other rites, also of all the supreme events of life, such as birth, adolescence, and death. In the most unlikely clefts of the mountain or in hidden spots of earth curious little bundles are found that betoken the shrine of some fetish.[209] Probably the oldest of all religious cults is the worship of the serpent, so often curiously mingled with that of the sun, as, for instance, in the pantheon of the Aztecs. In his “Origin of Civilization,” Sir John Lubbock says that, “as an object of worship the serpent is preëminent among ancients.”[210] Do we not also know that in that period which the historian Gibbon calls the happiest and most prosperous of the human race—the era of Marcus Aurelius—the Romans sent every year a troop of young girls to feed a great serpent asleep within a sacred cave, and that if any of the maidens were impure the serpent did not eat and the harvest of that year was a failure? How many visitors to the pueblos of the American Indian comprehend the profound reason for the awe that underlies the worship there of what is to the average white man an object of repulsion if not of fear—the rattlesnake? Yet it is easy to understand when explained. It has long been observed that the mysterious force by which all things move, whether on earth, in the sky, or under the sea, is regarded by the savage as so inexplicable that he believes it to be controlled by unseen beings of superhuman power. Consequently, the continuous movement of a serpent, whether slow or swift, without any visible aid to locomotion, would strike the primitive man as especially mysterious; add to this its power of hypnosis, its immortality achieved through the annual shedding of its skin, and lastly, a death-dealing sting, and we see reason enough why savages should regard a creature, thus endowed with gifts he has not, with such awe and fear as would lead to an intense desire to propitiate the occult power. Given desire of sufficient intensity, it may in itself become worship. Various scholars have pointed out that not only is the zig-zag form of lightning the natural sky symbol of the serpent, but that since both may kill instantaneously when they strike, there is another logical association of ideas between them.[211] The plumed serpent,[212] Awanyu, was guardian of the waters, and had for his sky emblem the rippling course of the Milky Way. Although the snake ceremonial is thought of as chiefly a prayer for rain, it had an equally intimate connection with the bestowal of health, reminding us of the classic myth in which the symbol of Esculapius was a serpent.