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.