The Mexica cosmological scheme in which the world has already been created and destroyed four times, each age ruled by a different sun and ended by a different catastrophe. The present, fifth age began at Teotihuacan when two gods threw themselves into a fire to become the sun and moon, and depends on continual sacrifice to keep the sun in motion. It is the best documented creation scheme from ancient Mesoamerica and the direct religious justification for Mexica sacrificial practice.
Facts
Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteAfter becoming the sun, Tonatiuh refuses to move across the sky until the assembled gods offer their own blood in sacrifice, so that the sun's daily motion is established from the very first dawn as dependent on divine, and later human, bloodletting rather than occurring automatically. 3 Scholarly NoteEvery fifty two years, when the solar and ritual calendars realigned, the Mexica extinguished every fire in the realm and held the New Fire ceremony, kindling a new flame on a sacrificed victim's chest atop a hill outside Tenochtitlan, a rite scholars read as a periodic renewal of the fear that the fifth sun's motion, and the present age with it, might not continue. 4 Scholarly NoteThe Nanahuatzin sacrifice at Teotihuacan, in which the humble, disease scarred god leaps into the fire before the more beautiful and initially reluctant Tecciztecatl, is read by scholars as a founding charter for the reciprocal debt Mexica religion held humanity owed the sun in return, discharged through ongoing ritual bloodletting and sacrifice. 3 Meaning
Central MotifSuccessive world-ages, each ended by a distinct catastrophe 1 History
Historical NoteEach age, or sun, is named in Nahuatl for the calendar day-sign on which it was destroyed: 4-Jaguar, 4-Wind, 4-Rain and 4-Water for the first four, and 4-Movement, Nahui Ollin, for the present and expected final age, whose end by earthquake the name itself predicts. 2 Historical NoteThe present, fifth sun is held to have been created at Teotihuacan, when the gods gathered and Nanahuatzin sacrificed himself by leaping into a bonfire to become the sun. 3 Historical NoteTradition names the four prior suns and their ends in turn: the first destroyed by jaguars, the second swept away by hurricane winds, the third consumed in a rain of fire, and the fourth drowned in a great flood, with humanity each time replaced by a new, imperfect population before the present fifth age began. 3 Text
Source TextCodex Chimalpopoca (Anales de Cuauhtitlan and Leyenda de los Soles), a Nahuatl-language compilation of the sixteenth century, is the fullest surviving narrative of the five suns in Nahua tradition's own words, independent of the Spanish-directed Florentine Codex. 2 Source TextFlorentine Codex, Book 7 (Sahagun) 3 Controversy
Point in DisputeSources disagree on the order and number of the suns and on which deity presides over each age; the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas and the Leyenda de los Soles give sequences that differ from the Florentine Codex's own account. 3 Sources
Primary SourceIndependent pictorial accounts of the five ages also survive in pre-Columbian and early colonial sources such as the Codex Vaticanus A and the Leyenda de los Soles, which do not always agree with the Florentine Codex's own sequence and attributions. 3 Learn More
The Four Prior Suns and the Fifth
Aztec tradition holds that the world has already been created and destroyed four times before the present age. The First Sun, Nahui-Ocelotl (Four Jaguar), was ruled by the smoking-mirror god Tezcatlipoca; it ended when jaguars descended and devoured the giants who were its people. The Second Sun, Nahui-Ehecatl (Four Wind), belonged to Quetzalcoatl and ended in hurricanes that swept humanity away, its survivors transformed into monkeys. The Third Sun, Nahui-Quiahuitl (Four Rain), was ruled by the rain god Tlaloc and ended in a rain of fire, its people becoming turkeys and other birds. The Fourth Sun, Nahui-Atl (Four Water), belonged to the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue and ended in a great flood that turned its people into fish.
The present, Fifth Sun, Nahui-Ollin (Four Movement), began when the gods gathered in darkness at Teotihuacan to choose who would sacrifice themselves in a great fire to become the new sun. The wealthy, proud god Tecuciztecatl volunteered but hesitated at the fire's edge four times; the poor, disease-scarred god Nanahuatzin leapt in without pause and rose as the sun. Ashamed, Tecuciztecatl leapt after him and became the moon, dimmed when the other gods threw a rabbit at his face for his hesitation. Neither sun nor moon would move until the assembled gods sacrificed themselves too, giving their own blood to set the sun in motion, a debt the Mexica held fell to human beings to keep repaying.
The Sun Stone and the Practice of Sacrifice
The most famous physical record of the Five Suns scheme is the so-called Aztec Calendar Stone, or Piedra del Sol, a monumental basalt disk carved around 1479 CE and rediscovered in 1790 beneath Mexico City's main square. Its central face bears the glyph Nahui-Ollin surrounded by the day-signs marking the ends of the four prior ages, though scholars continue to debate exactly how the stone's imagery should be read as calendrical or narrative content.
The fullest written versions of the myth were recorded after the Spanish conquest, chiefly in the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, compiled with Nahua informants through interviews and pictorial sources during the sixteenth century. Because it was set down decades after conquest, from older oral and pictographic tradition filtered through colonial-era collaboration, scholars weigh it carefully as evidence for pre-conquest belief rather than as an unmediated transcript.
The scheme did more than narrate the past: it explained and justified the Mexica state's demand for continual human sacrifice, since the Fifth Sun was held to be inherently unstable, moving only because the gods had given their own blood at Teotihuacan. The number and order of the prior suns vary somewhat between surviving sources, which this entry treats as evidence of a living, regionally inflected tradition rather than a single fixed text.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The Five Suns is the Mexica creation cosmology of successive failed world-ages leading to the present.
Belongs to Tradition
Corresponds To
Both are Mesoamerican accounts of a world already created and destroyed more than once before the present age, the K'iche' Maya and the Nahua Mexica traditions' own answers to the pattern of cyclical world-ages comparative religion traces widely.
Originated In
Related To
The Legend of the Suns recounts four prior worlds already destroyed and remade before the present, Fifth Sun, itself a real instance of repeated cosmic destruction and renewal; whether Aztec tradition expected a sixth sun to follow this one's own foretold end by earthquake is not stated in the source, so the parallel to an infinitely continuing cycle is not asserted beyond the four renewals the text itself describes.
Both bind Aztec cosmic renewal to a fixed calendrical mechanism: the Five Suns account the ages the cosmos has already survived, the New Fire Ceremony the recurring rite that keeps the present one from ending.
Sources
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