Charmers often supplement their performances with juggling, sleight of hand, and other tricks. One occasional feat is "turning a rod into a serpent", a trick that has been known since Biblical times (see Exodus 7:12). This is reportedly accomplished by putting pressure on a particular nerve behind the snake's head, which causes it to stiffen up [3].
It is said that so expert in restoring life had Asclepius become that Hades, God of the Underworld, complained to his brother Zeus that fewer and fewer souls were being sent down to him in Hades.
The cock was sacred to Asclepius and the bird they sacrificed as his altar. "I owe a cock to Asclepius" were Socrates last words on the point of death. The cock's crow heralds daybreak, the awakening to a new day, or symbolically resurrection into a new life. Aesculapius became so skilled a physician that he was able to restore the dead to life. Perhaps this means the new life after death as the sacrifice of a cock by Socrates to Aesculapius seems to suggest. Or it might be that those healed by Asclepius experienced a special type of new life after death other than Hades which is where all the dead were supposed to go?
Socrates was executed with a dose of hemlock poison:
"When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end. He was beginning to grow cold about the groin, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and said (they were his last words)--`Krito, we owe a cock to Asklepios. Pay it and do not neglect it.'" [Plato, Phaedo 118a (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
