| The most fully explored aspects of Aztec reality are quite probably those that relate to the centralized religion timed by the solar calendar and acted out in the temples, plazas, and streets of the city. Sahagun gives minute details about each month's rituals, such as descriptions of the special festival foods that would have been prepared by women in the households. What these accounts allow us to envisage is the participation of the people, rising on the day of the feast, assembling at different places in and outside the city to watch dramatic re-enactments of myth and legendary history featuring mock battles, ballgames, races, and other contests. Surging through the streets, the people watched young women and men singing and dancing as they had been taught in the schools, and undoubtedly dancing spread beyond the featured performers. The sacrificial acts that are described seem less public, taking place in the temples raised up on terraced pyramid platforms or within the courtyards of individual house compounds. While the people knew what happened in these more private settings, their own experience of the festivals was more of the processionals to the temples, less of the human sacrifices that occupy modern attention.
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