The Fifth Sun

Tonatiuh is the Mexica god of the sun in its daytime aspect, the shining disc whose face, tongue protruding and framed by rays, is commonly identified with the central figure of the great basalt Sun Stone, the so-called Aztec Calendar Stone now in Mexico City. Mexica cosmology reckoned the present world as the Fifth Sun, the latest of a series of world-ages each created and destroyed in turn.

The Legend of the Suns and related colonial texts tell how the gods gathered in the darkness at Teotihuacan and how a humble, ailing god threw himself into the fire to be reborn as the sun, which then hung motionless and demanded the sacrifice of the other gods before it would move across the sky. From this myth the Mexica drew the belief, recorded in the post-conquest sources, that the sun's motion had continually to be nourished by offerings, so that the imagery of Tonatiuh is inseparable from war and the sustaining of the sun.