The Five Suns

The Aztecs held that four Suns, four whole world-ages, had risen and been destroyed before the present one. In the sequence of the Leyenda de los Soles (1558): the First Sun, 4 Jaguar, was ruled by Tezcatlipoca and peopled by acorn-eating giants, until after 676 years jaguars devoured them all; the Second, 4 Wind, under Quetzalcoatl, ended in a hurricane that turned people into monkeys; the Third, 4 Rain, under Tlaloc, perished beneath a rain of fire, its survivors becoming turkeys; the Fourth, 4 Water, under the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, drowned in a flood lasting fifty-two years that turned humanity into fish. Only the couple Tata and Nene survived in a hollow log — and were turned into dogs when the smoke of the fish they secretly roasted offended the gods. Other sources, such as the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, give the ages in a different order and duration.

The Fifth Sun was born at Teotihuacan. The gods gathered in darkness and agreed that one of them must leap into a great fire to become the new sun. Rich Tecciztecatl approached the flames four times and flinched; the humble, pustule-covered Nanahuatzin shut his eyes and jumped, and rose as the sun. Shamed, Tecciztecatl followed and rose as a second sun, so the gods threw a rabbit at his face to dim him — Mexicans still see the rabbit in the moon. But the new sun hung motionless, demanding blood, and only after the assembled gods gave up their own hearts and the wind god Ehecatl blew with all his force did it begin to move. This age, 4 Movement (Nahui Ollin), is fated to end in earthquakes; the debt of blood that keeps the sun moving became the theological ground of Aztec heart sacrifice.

The most famous image of this cosmology is the Sun Stone, a basalt disk about 3.58 meters across unearthed in the Zócalo of Mexico City in 1790: at its center is the sign 4 Movement, framed by the four square emblems of the perished Suns. It now hangs in the National Museum of Anthropology.