The sacrificial priests did not wash, and never cut their hair, so they looked wild and dirty. The Aztecs held a four day opening ceremony of the great temple of Tenochtitlan in 1487. According to some reports, 80,000 people were sacrificed to the gods! The priests usually used obsidian daggers when they sacrificed someone and it was a very brutal process when they did it. The people they usually sacrificed were prisoners of war that they had captured or some people would even volunteer, because they wanted a glorious death. Though the human sacrifice is the most talked about, there were actually many types of sacrifices in the empire. The people believed that they owed a blood-debt to the gods. They wanted to avert disaster by paying the endless debt. Blood was a common theme - the sacrifice that the gods required.