For the Aztec, the appeasement of the gods—and thus the world's survival—depended on an ever growing, ever demanding empire that ultimately could not be sustained. As Carrasco says ...

Xiuhtecuhtli, whose name means "turquoise lord" in the Nahuatl language, was the Aztec "new fire" god. The Aztecs kept a "holy fire" continuously burning in the Fire Temple at Tenochtitlan ...

a fetus’s healthy development depended on the will of the gods. Aztec society, whose powerful empire stretched over what is now southern Mexico from the 14th through 16th centuries, was suffused ...

This empire had been created only in the 1430s ... The poet and writer Adriana Diaz Enciso explains the snake's connection to the Aztec gods, and especially to the great feathered serpent god ...