(M215) This general description of the custom may now be illustrated by particular examples. Thus at the festival called Toxcatl, the greatest festival of the Mexican year, a young man was annually sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca, “the god of gods,” after having been maintained and worshipped as that great deity in person for a whole year. According to the old Franciscan monk Sahagun, our best authority on the Aztec religion, the sacrifice of the human god fell at Easter or a few days later, so that, if he is right, it would correspond in date as well as in character to the Christian festival of the death and resurrection of the Redeemer.(674) More exactly he tells us that the sacrifice took place on the first day of the fifth Aztec month, which according to him began on the twenty-third or twenty-seventh day of April.(675) However, according to other Spanish authorities of the sixteenth century the festival lasted from the ninth to the nineteenth day of May, and the sacrifice of the human victim in the character of the god was performed on the last of these days.(676) An eminent modern authority, Professor E. Seler, is of opinion that the festival originally celebrated the beginning of the year, and that it fell on the day when the sun on his passage northward to the tropic of Cancer stood in the zenith over the city of Mexico, which in the early part of the sixteenth century would be the ninth or tenth day of May (old style) or the nineteenth or twentieth day of May (new style).(677) Whatever the exact date of the celebration may have been, we are told that the “feast was not made to any other end, but to demand rain, in the same manner that we solemnize the Rogations; and this feast was always in May, which is the time that they have most need of rain in those countries.”(678)