The gods asked human beings to appreciate what had been given to them and to make sacrifices, mostly by bleeding themselves, but sometimes even by giving the ultimate gift, that of human life. If human beings refused to do this, the fragile world might come to an end. Other, prior worlds had ended in disaster; the Nahuas never forgot that they were living under Nanahuatzin’s Fifth Sun. In more ancient days one of their own children was probably offered up. This seems to have happened around the world in the earliest eras, before writing existed to document the practice in any permanent way. In
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