In the Christian polemic of the Church Fathers, Cardea is associated with two otherwise unknown deities who preside over doorways: Forculus, from "fores", "door", plural in form because double doors were common on public buildings and elite homes "(domūs)"; and Limentinus, from "limen, liminis", "threshold" (compare English "liminal"). St. Augustine mocks the apparent triviality of these "little gods" in one of his "attacks against the multitude of gods," noting that while one doorkeeper is adequate for a human household, the Roman gods require three: "evidently Forculus can't watch the hinge and the threshold at the same time." Modern scholarship has pointed out that this particular set of divinities belongs to rituals of marking out sacred space and fixing boundaries, religious developments hypothesized to have occurred during the transition from pastoralism to an agrarian society. Among Roman deities of this type, Terminus was the most significant.