During the 13th century AD, a group of former hunter-gatherers travelled to modern-day Mexico and founded the Aztec Empire. With the grand city of Tenochtitlan as their capital, the Aztecs became one of the most powerful empires of the Americas, with at its peak up to 500 city states and hundreds of villages under their control by the 15th century. Massive pyramid-shaped temples were constructed and large cities were designed as a grid, providing a structured format for housing, schools, markets, and places of worship. Not only that, they were one of the very first cultures to develop a universal education system, where between the ages of 15 and 20, boys and girls of both the upper and lower classes went to school to learn how to be productive members of Aztec society. This efficiency and societal value in education allowed for great strides in various fields of science, including astronomy. The Aztecs adapted the Mayan 365 day solar calendar to keep track of the seasons, and could even accurately predict when solar eclipses would occur.

In addition to technological and scientific innovation, Aztec society, as with any empire, required conquest. Many Aztec men were trained to be proud warriors, using weapons tipped with shards of obsidian. The elite soldiers of the Aztec Empire were known as Jaguar Warriors. And they did not simply kill their enemies: they abducted and dragged war prisoners to their sacred temples to be sacrificed to the gods. It is estimated that on average 250,000 people were sacrificed every year, their bodies and blood littering the many steps of their temples. This vicious and mighty empire would meet its end when Spanish conquistadors arrived and slaughtered the indigenous population with superior technology and the spread of smallpox. Many Aztec cities and structures were burned to the ground, its people murdered or enslaved. To this day much of the Aztec society and culture has been lost to time, but its legacy still lives on through the descendants of the once dominant nation.

Blood sacrifices were a major part of numerous Mesoamerican cultures, but the Aztec people did it in greater numbers and with more brutality than any other. Methods of human sacrifice included beheading, drowning, archers, removal of the heart, and even flaying victims alive. The reason for this obsession was because they believed that, since the gods used their blood to create humanity, they were in debt and had to repay it to the gods. Additionally, many of the gods were believed to require the blood of humans to maintain their own godly power so that they could protect and bless mankind in return. These sacrifices also helped to prevent another apocalypse.

According to Aztec religion, he world was the fifth itteration in a long line of worlds, with each world having its own sun god. In the beginning, the primordial cardinal direction gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, and Xipe Totec created the earth and heavens from the corpse of a giant crocodile monster. Afterwards, the role of sun god went through different aplicants, with each having to resign after destroying their respective worlds. Now, as the fifth world, the Aztecs worshipped the gods so that their world wouldn’t be the next to be destroyed.