Fourth Sun

Bierhorst's translation names Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of lakes, rivers and standing water, as ruler of the Fourth Sun, called 4-Water, the age that follows Tlaloc's fiery Third Sun in the Legend of the Suns. Chalchiuhtlicue is described elsewhere in Aztec religious tradition as Tlaloc's wife or, in some sources, his sister, giving the sequence of the Third and Fourth Suns a thematic continuity of water and rain deities even as the specific ruling god changes between them.

Her age ended in a flood so total that it covered the earth for years rather than days, drowning the world's people, whom the Legend of the Suns says were transformed into fish as the waters rose, the last of the animal transformations recorded across the first four suns before the very different ending, and beginning, given to the Fifth. Chalchiuhtlicue takes her name from chalchihuitl, the Nahuatl word for jade or a comparable green stone prized above almost any other material in Aztec culture for its association with water, fertility and preciousness, and she is conventionally shown in surviving codices wearing a jade colored skirt and headdress, an iconography consistent with her rule over lakes, rivers and the standing fresh water that, in the Fourth Sun, rises to overwhelm the world she otherwise nourishes.

Read together, the First through Fourth Suns trace a sequence scholars have long noted corresponds loosely to the four classical elements as ancient Mesoamerican thought conceived them: jaguars and the earth-bound giants of the First Sun, the hurricane wind of the Second, the fire that falls from the sky in the Third, and the flood that closes the Fourth. Miguel Leon-Portilla treats this patterning as a genuine structural feature of the Five Suns narrative rather than a coincidence, though he is careful to note that Nahua cosmological categories do not map onto the Greek four-element scheme exactly, and the parallel should be read as a loose organizing device rather than a precise cross-cultural equivalence.

Chalchiuhtlicue's flood closes out this four-part destructive sequence, and the Legend of the Suns marks the transition to the Fifth Sun as categorically different from the four that came before it: rather than a ruling god simply falling to catastrophe, the Fifth Sun begins with the gods themselves gathering in council to decide who would sacrifice themselves to become the next sun. Leon-Portilla is careful to note this four-part patterning is a scholarly observation about the narrative's shape rather than a category Nahua sources themselves ever labeled with a Greek-style elemental scheme; Aztec cosmological thought organized the world through its own set of categories, including the cardinal directions and their associated colors and deities, which only loosely and partially overlap with the earth, air, fire and water divisions a modern reader might otherwise be tempted to project onto the sequence.