Anthropology

And one of my professors had an interesting theory on Tenochitlan's founding. The story is that the gods had told the Aztecs to look for an eagle perched on a cactus eating a serpent as the sign where they should build their city.

But my prof thought that the priests were tired of the Aztec being nomadic (partly because everyone hated them), and while Lake Texcoco, before being transformed by the Aztecs, was marshy, they wanted to stop there. There just happened to be an eagle eating a serpent on a cactus so they huddled together and hatched the plot that they would say it was a sign from the gods to build a city... oh, and start with our residences first, of course.

A lesser known part of the legend is that after seeing the eagle, one of the priests jumped into the lake and communicated with the rain and water god, Tlaloc, who verified that this was the spot. So I've tacked on to his theory that maybe there was some grumbling from the non-priests so they huddled together again and selected one of them to go "chat with Tlaloc" to help seal the deal.