The Fifth Sun

Colonial era Nahuatl sources agree that the present world is not the first the gods have made. The Legend of the Suns and the related Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas both describe four earlier eras, each governed by a different deity and each ending in a distinct catastrophe, though the two sources do not fully agree on their order or on which god ruled which age.

In the most commonly cited sequence, the First Sun, 4-Jaguar, was ruled by Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror god, and ended when jaguars descended and devoured its people. The Second Sun, 4-Wind, ruled by Quetzalcoatl, was destroyed by great hurricanes that swept its inhabitants away and transformed them into monkeys. The Third Sun, 4-Rain, under the rain god Tlaloc, ended in a rain of fire, sometimes read as a shower of burning ash from volcanic eruption, that consumed its people or turned them into birds.

The Fourth Sun, 4-Water, ruled by Tlaloc's consort Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of rivers and lakes, ended in a great flood that transformed the survivors into fish. Each transformation myth explained something present in the Nahua world, whether animal kinds or natural forces, as the residue of an earlier, failed creation, building toward the fifth and current age.

With the fourth world destroyed, the gods assembled in darkness at Teotihuacan to decide who would become the new sun. Tecuciztecatl, a proud and wealthy god, volunteered at once, while Nanahuatzin, a poor, disease marked god, was chosen as his humbler counterpart. Both prepared through penance, then approached the sacrificial fire. Tecuciztecatl, offered the honour of jumping first, hesitated four times, afraid of the flames, until Nanahuatzin leapt in without pause and was consumed.

Shamed, Tecuciztecatl finally followed. From the fire two suns rose into the sky, Nanahuatzin transformed into the sun proper, later called Tonatiuh, and Tecuciztecatl into a second, equally bright light. The gods, judging two suns too much for the world to bear, threw a rabbit into Tecuciztecatl's face, dimming him into the moon, whose markings are still read as that rabbit's form. Even then the new sun would not move across the sky until the assembled gods gave their own blood in sacrifice, an act finally accomplished with the help of the wind god Ehecatl.

From this founding sacrifice the Mexica drew a demanding theological conclusion, that the sun's motion, and therefore the survival of the world itself, depended on a continuing debt of human blood, the ideological foundation for the large scale offerings conducted at temples such as the Templo Mayor. The era carries the calendrical name Nahui Ollin, Four Movement, and Mexica tradition held that this fifth world, like the four before it, was destined to end, in earthquakes.