The original Aztecs were a nomadic civilisation of warriors and hunters who came from the northern part of Mexico, settled on the island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in about 1200 AD and built Tenochtitlan which was later to become Mexico City.
The Aztecs conquered central Mexico and forces their own religion on the native population. Tezcatlipoca, the god associated with the night, wind, storms, war, magic, divination and whose symbol was the jaguar, was fairly central to their belief system. Huitzilopochtli, god of Tenochtitlan, was also a god of war, symbolised by the hummingbird.
The surrounding agricultural community had no choice, but incorporated these strange gods into their own religion; such was the power of the Aztecs and the fear they engendered.
The Aztecs believed that the world had been created four times before and that their particular one, the fifth, was the final one. This tenet was carved into a huge block of stone called the Sun Stone, or Calendar Stone, which measures twelve feet across. It was excavated in 1790 in Zocalo, the main square of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The center of the stone shows the sun god and each of four panels surrounding it show the four previous creations. The original bright colors that the Aztecs loved have been worn off but the stone can still be seen in Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology.
They also held the belief that the sun died every night when it slipped down behind the horizon. In order to bring it back to life, according their religion, it needed human blood to give it the strength. More than fifteen thousand men were sacrificed every year to keep Hiutzilopochtli, the terrifying sun god, happy. Most of the sacrificial victims were prisoners taken in wars and battles and they often attacked other communities just to capture enough victims for the sacrifice. So, it was no wonder that the local population complied with these ferocious settlers.
By the time Montezuma II came to power in 1502, the Aztec civilisation had reached its height and it was brought to its knees by the conquering Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes in 1519-21. It all started to fall apart when Aztec chiefs fell to their knees before Cortes. He had fulfilled an ancient Aztec prophesy which said the god of the wind, Quetzalcoatl, who had fair hair, fair skin and a beard, had been exiled and had promised to return from the west, in the year One Reed, going by the Aztec calendar.
By a strange coincidence Cortes arrived on the Atlantic coast, with the intention of conquering and plundering the riches of the Aztecs. The year was 1519, or year of One Reed. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
