Legend of the Suns: The Aztec Story of Four Destroyed Worlds

An Aztec account of four earlier worlds destroyed by jaguars, wind, fiery rain and flood, and humans remade from old bones and divine blood.

The Legend of the Suns, a Nahuatl text dated 1558, says four worlds came before ours, destroyed by jaguars, wind, a rain of fire and a flood. We live in the Fifth Sun.

The Legend of the Suns (Leyenda de los Soles) is a Nahuatl text written in Latin letters in 1558, a generation after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. It survived as part of a manuscript known as the Codex Chimalpopoca, which was lost around 1949 and is now known through photographs and copies. It gives the Aztec account of the world's successive ages, each called a Sun.

Four worlds came before ours, each named for the day it ended. The first was destroyed when its people were eaten by jaguars. In the second, a great wind swept the world and the people became monkeys. In the third, fire rained from the sky and people became turkeys. In the fourth, a flood covered everything and people became fish. Our age is the Fifth Sun, named 4 Movement, and it is expected to end in earthquakes.

To make people for the new age, the god Quetzalcoatl travels to Mictlan, the underworld, and asks its lord for the bones of the previous humans. After tricks and a fall in which the bones are broken, he brings them out. The goddess Cihuacoatl grinds them like maize, and the gods bleed onto the meal to create the new humans.

Scholars compare the text with the carved Aztec Sun Stone, which shows the four previous suns around the face at its center. Readers of comparative myth note the resemblance to Hesiod's successive races and to the making of humans from clay and a slain god's blood in the Babylonian Atrahasis. The parallels are real but likely independent, since the two traditions had no contact.