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.