The Legend of the Five Suns, recorded by Bernardino de Sahagun's Nahua informants in the Florentine Codex, tells how the gods gathered in darkness at Teotihuacan to choose who would sacrifice himself to become the new sun. Tecciztecatl volunteered first, and he came prepared: his offerings were rich ones, branches of quetzal feathers, balls of gold, spines of coral instead of the maguey thorns others used to draw blood, and fragrant copal instead of ordinary incense. Nanahuatzin, a small, sore-covered god without wealth or standing, offered only what he had, bundles of reeds, balls of grass, maguey spines tipped with his own blood, and scabs pulled from his own skin in place of copal.
When the fire was built up and the two gods faced it, Tecciztecatl approached first, as befit his boldness, but the heat drove him back, and he tried again three more times, failing each time to jump. Nanahuatzin, given his turn, closed his eyes and threw himself in without hesitating, and the fire consumed him at once. Shamed into following, Tecciztecatl finally leapt in behind him. Both gods rose into the sky as suns of identical brightness, and the assembled gods, refusing to let two suns burn with equal force, threw a rabbit into Tecciztecatl's face, dimming his light and leaving its silhouette printed on him forever.
Nanahuatzin's courage rather than Tecciztecatl's wealth is the story's explicit moral, and Aztec ritual practice echoed it directly: sacrifice by the poor and the humble was held to outweigh sacrifice by the rich, a lesson Nahua audiences would have heard as a comment on status itself.