A Storm God's Contradictory Ending

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.