Mexico
A cosmos on its fifth attempt, with the manner of its ending in the name.
Four worlds preceded this one in the Mexica account, and each was destroyed in a distinct way: by jaguars, by wind, by fiery rain, by flood. The Leyenda de los Soles names them in sequence with the peoples who perished in each. The present world is the Fifth Sun, Nahui Ollin, Four Movement, and the name states its manner of death in advance, since it will end in earthquake. Nothing about the arrangement suggests permanence.
The fifth sun also required payment to start. In the account Sahagún's informants gave, the gods assembled at Teotihuacan in darkness and the scabbed, humble Nanahuatzin threw himself into the fire to become the sun; even then it would not move until the remaining gods gave their own blood. Human sacrifice followed from that logic directly, as the continuation of a debt the gods had opened, which makes Mexica ritual a maintenance programme for a cosmos known to be running on borrowed motion.
The claim was made publicly and in stone. The Piedra del Sol carries the four previous suns as glyphs arranged around a central face, with the date Four Movement enclosing them, an official statement that the world has ended four times and is scheduled to do so again. The sequence is treated in Five Suns, the regional scheme in Mesoamerican World Ages and Mesoamerican Eschatology, the monument in Aztec Sun Stone (Piedra del Sol). Most traditions place the end beyond memory. This one puts four of them in the past tense and carves the fifth's cause of death on a public calendar.
See also
- Five SunsThe Aztec myth of four worlds that have already ended in flood, fire, wind, and
- Mesoamerican World AgesThe Mesoamerican cosmos is a series of world-ages, each created, destroyed, and
- Aztec Sun Stone (Piedra del Sol)Late post-Classic Mexica basalt monolith, 3.6 metres in diameter, 24.6 tonnes. T
- Mesoamerican EschatologyThe end-of-the-world imagination of the Maya, Aztec, and related peoples, built
Further reading
- Leyenda de los Soles, in Codex Chimalpopoca · tr. John Bierhorst, History and Mythology of the Aztecs, University of Arizona Press, 1992 The primary Nahuatl account of the five suns and their destructions.
- Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain · tr. Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble, School of American Research, 1950-82 Nahuatl-and-Spanish compilation from indigenous informants, books III and VII.
- Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture · University of Oklahoma Press, 1963 On the philosophical reading of the sun-sequence and its fragility.