Fifth Sun

Bierhorst's translation of the Legend of the Suns places the birth of the Fifth Sun, called 4-Movement, at Teotihuacan, where the assembled gods needed a volunteer willing to cast himself into a great sacrificial fire to become the new sun. The wealthy, richly adorned god Tecciztecatl offered himself first but hesitated repeatedly at the fire's edge, while Nanahuatzin, a humble, diseased god with little to offer by comparison, threw himself in without hesitation and emerged as the sun, later named Tonatiuh; the shamed Tecciztecatl then followed him into the fire and became the moon.

Even after Tonatiuh rose, the Legend of the Suns says he refused to move across the sky until the other gods offered their own blood in sacrifice to give him the strength to do so, an act of collective divine self-sacrifice that Aztec religious practice took as the origin and continuing justification for its own tradition of ritual bloodletting and human sacrifice, understood as sustaining the sun's motion in turn. The Legend of the Suns continues past the sun's rising to describe Quetzalcoatl descending to Mictlan, the underworld, to retrieve the bones of humanity from earlier ages, grinding them and mixing them with his own blood to create the people who would live under this Fifth Sun, a creation episode distinct from, but told in immediate sequence with, the sacrifice of Nanahuatzin and Tecciztecatl that gave the age its sun and moon.

The name of the Fifth Sun, 4-Movement, or Nahui Ollin, is itself a statement about how this age is expected to end: unlike the jaguars, wind, fire and flood that closed the four ages before it, Aztec tradition holds that the Fifth Sun will end in movement, understood as catastrophic earthquakes that will shake the world apart. Because this is the present age, the ending is a prophecy rather than a completed myth, and Miguel Leon-Portilla reads the Aztec state's enormous ritual investment in sacrifice, particularly the mass offerings associated with Huitzilopochtli and the sun's daily journey, as directly motivated by the belief that this final catastrophe could be delayed, though not permanently averted, through continued human devotion.

The Fifth Sun as a cosmological age is closely related to, but distinct from, the Doctrine already recorded elsewhere in this atlas under the same name, which treats the broader body of belief and ritual practice built around this present age; this entry covers the age itself, the fifth in the Legend of the Suns' sequence of world-creations, and the two are cross-linked rather than merged. Because the Fifth Sun has no completed ending within the myth itself, its prophecy of destruction by earthquake functions differently from the first four ages' already-finished catastrophes: it is a standing warning built into the age's own name, Movement, rather than a past event being recounted, and Aztec state religion treated the daily rising of the sun as proof that the postponement, secured through continued sacrifice, was still holding rather than as evidence the danger had passed.