AZTEC RELIGION developed in the capital city of Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries CE. The Aztec religious tradition combined and transformed a number of ritual, mythic, and cosmic elements from the heterogeneous cultural groups who inhabited the central plateau of Mesoamerica. Seldom has a capital city fit the category of "center of the world" more completely than Tenochtitlán: the high plateau of Mexico is roughly the center of Mesoamerica; the Valley of Mexico is the heart of that plateau; interconnected lakes formed the center of the valley; and Tenochtitlán was constructed near the center of the lakes.

Mexico's central highlands had been the dominant cultural region of central Mesoamerica since the beginning of the common era, when the great imperial capital of Teotihuacán ("abode of the gods") had been established thirty miles north of where...