Two categories of dead persons went up to the heavens as companions of the sun: the Quauhteca (“Eagle People”), who comprised the warriors who died on the battlefield or on the sacrificial stone, and the merchants who were killed while traveling in faraway places; and the women who died while giving birth to their first child and thus became Cihuateteo, “Divine Women.” All the other dead went down to Mictlan, under the northern deserts, the abode of Mictlantecuhtli, the skeleton-masked god of death. The old paradise of the rain god Tlaloc, depicted in the Teotihuacán frescoes, opened its gardens to those who died by drowning, lightning, or as a result of leprosy, dropsy, gout, or lung diseases. It is the wrong ideology of the peoples that they will complete their remaining prayers in the old age. Müller (and his followers) discovered affinities existing among the religious perspectives of both the Indo-Aryan-speaking and Semitic-speaking peoples and set numerous scholars on the path of investigating comparative mythology, thus contributing in a most direct way to the store of knowledge about religions.

This mythology, which was the basis of the ceremonial life, was maintained by the ceremonial priest, but there were also common folktales that resembled those of other indigenous cultures in North America. Max Müller, often called the “Father of the history of religions,” stated that “Particularly in the early history of the human intellect, there exists the most intimate relationship between language, religion, and nationality.” This insight supplies the basis for a genetic classification of religions (associating them by descent from a common origin), which Müller believed the most scientific principle possible. Such classifications are found in many textbooks on comparative religion, and they offer a convenient framework for presenting religious history. The classification of religions involves: (1) the effort to establish groupings among historical religious communities having certain elements in common or (2) the attempt to categorize similar religious phenomena to reveal the structure of religious experience as a whole.

The many schemes suggested for classifying religious communities and religious phenomena all have one purpose in common: to bring order, system, and intelligibility to the vast range of knowledge about human religious experience. The physical location of a religious community reveals little of the specific religious life of the group. Israel also has a sizeable community of Druze-about 140,000, located entirely in the northern portions of the country. After local success, Syrian nationalists outside the Druze community joined the revolt, and the rebellion spread throughout the region and into Damascus before it was suppressed in 1927. Among Syrians, this revolt is remembered as the nation’s first nationalist uprising. Adib al-Shishakli in 1954. Moreover, the son of Sulṭān al-Aṭrash, Manṣūr al-Aṭrash, became one of the founding members of the Syrian Baʿath Party. Spanish documents indicate that the priesthood was one of the most elaborate of Aztec institutions. The Aztec calendar was the one common to much of Mesoamerica, and it comprised a solar year of 365 days and a sacred year of 260 days; the two yearly cycles running in parallel produced a larger cycle of 52 years. Aztec religion, the religion followed by the Aztecs, a Nahuatl-speaking people who ruled a large empire in central and southern Mexico in the 15th and early 16th centuries.

Quetzalcóatl, the survivor of the age of the Wind Sun, brought civilization to the people. The Aztecs had four mythological eras: those of (1) the Water Sun, which was destroyed by flood, (2) the Sun of the Earth, which was destroyed by earthquake, (3) the Wind Sun, which was destroyed by a giant, with only Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, remaining, prophesying the destruction of the Earth by wind and the evolution of humans into monkeys, and (4) the present Sun of Fire, which will end in a general conflagration. 51% of the population believes humans and other living things evolved: 26% through natural selection only, 21% somehow guided, 4% do not know. The world vision of the Aztecs conceded only a small part to human beings in the scheme of things. In the same way, the sun and moon were created: the gods, assembled in the darkness at Teotihuacán, built a huge fire; two of them, Nanahuatzin, a small deity covered with ulcers, and Tecciztécatl, a richly bejeweled god, threw themselves into the flames, from which the former emerged as the sun and the latter as the moon.