The completely undiscovered half of the Western Hemisphere, the New World, or in Amerigo Vespucci's honor "America" was home to hundreds of ethnically different tribes and dozens of diverse language groups. However nothing was known of these peoples until the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Why is there so little known about these 350 tribal groups and 150 linguistic stocks, one may ask? The answer to this question lies in the analysis of the two largest empires that Spanish conquistadores encountered on their first trips to "America." The Aztecs and Incas were similar in their belief that religion called them to battle and conquer their surroundings yet different in the actual structures for which they achieved their wide-spread imperialistic rule.

With both the Aztecs in Central America and the Incas in Andean South America, religious ideology was the force that transformed the culture (Sullivan 22). For the Aztecs, their worship...