After Quetzalcoatl had been about ten years on the throne, opposition to his power, fomented by his enemies from the first, assumed serious proportions. Several causes are plausibly attributed by the records and their interpreters to this opposition. The new pontiff-king had effected many innovations in religious ceremonies. It does not appear that his doctrines differed very materially from those entertained by his predecessors, but the changes introduced by him had been so readily admitted by reason of the popularity and zeal of their author and his subordinates, as to excite jealousy among the ecclesiastical powers. Most prominent among his peculiar reforms, and the one that is reported to have contributed most to his downfall, was his unvarying opposition to human sacrifice. This sacrifice had prevailed from pre-Toltec times at Teotihuacan, and had been adopted more or less extensively in Culhuacan and Tollan. By Quetzalcoatl it was absolutely prohibited in the temples of the latter capital, and thus the powerful priesthood of Otompan, and Culhuacan was arrayed against him. Again it is thought that under Quetzalcoatl the spiritual power always closely connected with the temporal in Nahua governments, became so predominant as to excite the jealousy and fears of the nobility in Tollan, who were restive under a priestly restraint not imposed on their brothers of corresponding rank in the other nations of the empire. Finally, under the rule of Ceacatl, Tollan had become the metropolis of the empire. It does not appear that the terms of the alliance, according to which the monarch of Culhuacan outranked the others, had been changed; but in the magnificence of her palaces and temples, and the skill and fame of her artists, if not in population, Tollan now surpassed the cities of the valley, and thus naturally was looked upon as a too successful rival. The dissatisfied element at home was headed by Huemac, or Tezcatlipoca, who had perhaps some well-founded claim to the throne, and received the support of the allied monarchs. The ensuing struggle is symbolized in the record of the Spanish writers by the successive tricks of the necromancers; and the religious strife between rival sects was continued with more or less bitterness down to the latest Aztec epoch. Such was Quetzalcoatl's repugnance to the shedding of human blood, that he seems to have voluntarily abandoned his throne against the wishes of his more warlike partisans, and after a brief stay in Quauhtitlan, to have crossed to the eastern plateau of Huitzilapan in 895. Huemac, Tezcatlipoca, or Nacaxoc succeeded immediately to the royal power in Tollan.[IV-38]