Five Suns

The Aztec, or Mexica, story of the Five Suns holds that the world has already ended four times. Each age was ruled by a sun, and each sun was destroyed in its own way. Humanity now lives under the fifth sun, and the myth is clear that it too will end. This is one of the clearest examples in the world of a thoroughly cyclical end-of-the-world imagination, set in stone on the Aztec calendar, the Sun Stone.

The four that fell

In the Mexica account, recorded after the Spanish conquest in sources like the Histoyre du Mechique and the Codex Chimalpopoca, the gods created and destroyed four worlds before this one:

1. Four Jaguar (Nahui Ocelotl): the first sun, ruled by the god Tezcatlipoca. It ended when jaguars devoured the people. Humans were transformed into the first humans' prey.
2. Four Wind (Nahui Ehecatl): the second sun, under Quetzalcoatl. It was destroyed by hurricanes that swept the people away and turned survivors into monkeys.
3. Four Rain (Nahui Quiahuitl): the third sun, under Tlaloc. It ended in fire and rain, a volcanic destruction that turned survivors into birds.
4. Four Water (Nahui Atl): the fourth sun, under the goddess Chalchiuhtlicue. A great flood drowned the world; survivors were changed into fish. This is the age that produced the humanity alive today.

Each catastrophe is tied to one of the four directions and one of the four elements in the Mexica scheme, so the sequence reads as a complete run through the possibilities of destruction.

The fifth sun and its debt

The present world is the Fifth Sun, Nahui Ollin (Four Movement). Its creation is told in the myth of the gods gathering at Teotihuacan. The old gods, lacking a sun to move the world, built a fire and called for a volunteer to leap into it. Two gods stepped forward: the proud Tecciztecatl, who hesitated, and the humble Nanahuatzin, who leapt without hesitation and became the sun. Ashamed, Tecciztecatl followed and became the moon.

But the new sun would not move. The other gods realized the world could only run if they gave their own lives to power it, so they allowed themselves to be sacrificed. This is the key to the Mexica sense of the end: the fifth sun lives on a debt. The world runs on the sacrificed gods, and human sacrifice was understood as repayment, feeding the sun so it would keep rising. The fifth sun's own end is not named with a specific catastrophe in the same way; it is simply owed, and the day it stops being fed, it ends.

On the Sun Stone

The Aztec Sun Stone (Piedra del Sol), carved in the early 1470s and now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, lays this cosmology out in stone. At the center is the face of the sun god Tonatiuh, surrounded by the four previous suns in their square cartouches, each marked with its ending (jaguar, wind, rain, water). The stone is, among other things, a monument to a world that has already ended four times and expects to end again.

Why it matters

The Five Suns is the New World's answer to the Kali Yuga and the Ragnarök. Like them it is cyclical, but unlike the Hindu ages it does not decline gently; it is a sequence of violent replacements, each world killed by the element that defines it. And unlike the Norse end, there is no promise of a better world after: the fifth sun is a world running on a blood-debt, and its close is left open. The Mesoamerican imagination did not expect the world to be saved so much as to be owed. The monument that states it is treated under Mexico.