Third Sun

Bierhorst's translation names Tlaloc, the rain and storm god, as ruler of the Third Sun, called 4-Rain, the age that follows Quetzalcoatl's brief Second Sun in the Legend of the Suns. Tlaloc's rule ended, according to the text, in a rain of fire falling from the heavens, a destruction that consumed the world's people even as it fell from a sky more commonly associated, under Tlaloc's ordinary rule, with life giving rain rather than flame.

Some of the age's people are described as transformed into birds in the destruction, escaping the fire by taking to the air, a detail Leon-Portilla reads alongside the transformations recorded for the Second and Fourth Suns as part of a consistent narrative device across the Five Suns cycle, in which survival from a world-ending catastrophe comes only through a change of form rather than through any of the surviving humans remaining as they had been. Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, a separate colonial compilation of Nahua cosmological material, assigns a different sequence of ruling gods and disasters to the ages altogether, and Miguel Leon-Portilla treats the mismatch between it and the Codex Chimalpopoca as evidence of genuine regional or lineage-based variation in how the Five Suns were told across different Nahua communities before the Spanish conquest, rather than a single fixed and universally agreed myth that colonial scribes simply transcribed.

The Third Sun's destruction by fire rather than by storm or flood has drawn particular comment from scholars precisely because Tlaloc is otherwise so consistently a rain and water deity across Aztec religion, worshipped for beneficial rainfall at his own major shrine atop Mount Tlaloc and honored alongside Huitzilopochtli at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan; a fire-based ending for the age of a rain god is, on the face of it, an unexpected pairing rather than an obvious one.

Miguel Leon-Portilla notes that some colonial sources instead assign the Third Sun's ending to Tlaloc withholding rain rather than sending fire, a variant closer to what a rain god's catastrophe might be expected to look like, which is one of several points where the Legend of the Suns and other colonial accounts of the Five Suns do not fully agree on the specifics of a given age, even where they agree on the god who ruled it. Tlaloc's own major shrine stood atop Mount Tlaloc east of Tenochtitlan, and a second shrine to him shared the summit of the Templo Mayor with Huitzilopochtli, the two gods' temples standing side by side atop the pyramid, an arrangement that gave equal state prominence to war, represented by Huitzilopochtli, and to the agricultural rain Tlaloc was ordinarily invoked to provide, which sharpens the oddity of a fire-based catastrophe closing his age in the Legend of the Suns' version of events.