Tezcatlipoca and the Later Suns

Tezcatlipoca's rule over the First Sun sets up a rivalry that the Legend of the Suns carries through the ages that follow it: the text describes Quetzalcoatl striking Tezcatlipoca down from his place as sun to begin the Second Sun, an act of succession by force rather than the more orderly transitions later ages undergo. Leon-Portilla reads this opening confrontation between the two gods as establishing a durable opposition in Aztec religious thought, Tezcatlipoca associated with night, sorcery and sudden reversal of fortune against Quetzalcoatl's associations with wind, learning and civilized order, an opposition that recurs across Aztec myth well beyond the Five Suns narrative itself.

Not every colonial source agrees on this detail: the alternative account preserved in Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas gives a different order for which god ruled which sun and by what disaster it fell, a divergence discussed further on the Fifth Sun entry, where the two traditions' disagreement is most consequential for how the current age is understood. Tezcatlipoca's name is usually translated Smoking Mirror, a reference to the obsidian mirror he carries and to obsidian more broadly, a black volcanic glass associated across Aztec religion with night, divination and sudden reversal; jaguars, themselves creatures of the night whose spotted coats colonial writers likened to a starry sky, fit this same nocturnal and predatory character, making them a fitting agent for the First Sun's destruction rather than an arbitrary choice of animal.