The fourth age is remembered as Nahui Atl, Four Water. In the chronology of the Leyenda de los Soles, its inhabitants lived for 676 years, thirteen complete cycles of fifty-two years. The age ended in a flood so extensive that mountains disappeared beneath the water, the heavens collapsed, and the people of the Fourth Sun were transformed into fish.
Several traditions associate this age with Chalchiuhtlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, goddess of rivers, lakes, streams, springs, and flowing water. Chalchiuhtlicue is closely related to Tlaloc but possesses a divine identity of her own. Where Tlaloc is particularly associated with rain, storms, mountains, and waters held within the heights, Chalchiuhtlicue is strongly connected with water already flowing across and through the inhabited world.
Her name evokes the blue-green brilliance of jade, one of the most precious substances known to the peoples of Tlalticpac. In painted images, streams of water may pour from her garments, carrying shells, aquatic creatures, or small human figures within their currents. These waters can nourish settlements and irrigate fields, but their abundance also contains the possibility of drowning and flood.
The Fourth Sun belonged to that abundance.
Its end demonstrated its excess.
The Leyenda de los Soles describes the destruction of Four Water with unusual detail. The people of the age had lived for 676 years and ate a food called Nahui Xochitl — Four Flower. Their destruction occurred in a year One House, on a day bearing the sign Four Water.
The flood did not resemble the seasonal rising of a lake or river. Water covered the world on a scale sufficient to make all the mountains disappear. The inhabitants were overwhelmed and became fish. The sky itself descended or collapsed, bringing the ordered separation between earth and heaven temporarily to an end.
The text also states that water endured for fifty-two years.
Whether this describes fifty-two years of continuous flooding at its greatest height, a prolonged age in which the waters remained across the devastated world, or a calendrical expression tied to the completion of a full Calendar Round is a matter on which later interpreters differ. Within the sacred chronology, however, the number is deliberate. The destruction of the Fourth Sun lasted through one complete fifty-two-year cycle.
The result was a profound alteration of Tlalticpac.
Valleys became lakes. River courses disappeared or were changed. Sediment filled lower ground. Hillsides collapsed. Settlements vanished beneath water or mud. When the flood finally withdrew, the landscape upon which the Fifth Sun would later develop did not need to resemble the world known before it.
Of the catastrophes associated with the first four Suns, the flood provides the clearest explanation for why remains of very ancient ages might now lie beneath lakes, marshes, deep alluvial plains, and former shorelines.
The Leyenda de los Soles preserves another story within the destruction of Four Water, concerning a man named Tata and his wife Nene.
Before the sky fell, Titlacahuan, a name or manifestation associated with Tezcatlipoca, warned the couple of what was coming. He instructed them to hollow out a great ahuehuetl, the enormous water-loving tree commonly known as the Montezuma cypress, and to enter it when the heavens began to descend.
They obeyed.
Titlacahuan sealed them inside and gave precise instructions concerning their food. Tata was to eat only a single ear of maize, and Nene likewise only one. Enclosed within the hollow tree, they survived while the waters covered the world.
Eventually the movement of their wooden refuge ceased. The waters had withdrawn enough for the tree to come to rest upon the ground. Tata and Nene emerged and saw fish around them.
They made fire.
They caught fish and roasted them.
The smoke rose into the sky.
The act immediately drew the attention of Citlalinicue and Citlaltonac, celestial deities associated with the stars. They questioned who had made fire and caused smoke to reach the heavens after the destruction of the world.
Titlacahuan descended to investigate.
He found Tata and Nene cooking the fish and rebuked them for what they had done. The surviving account is brief and does not provide a lengthy explanation of their offense. Their disobedience is nevertheless clear: they had survived according to divine instruction and then acted beyond what had been permitted to them.
Titlacahuan punished them by cutting off their heads and placing new heads upon their buttocks.
Tata and Nene became dogs.
The story is therefore very different from flood traditions in which a surviving couple simply becomes the ancestors of renewed humanity. In the Leyenda de los Soles, these survivors do not repopulate the next age. Their survival ends in transformation.
Humanity of the Fifth Sun would have to be created by another means.
The majority of the inhabitants of Four Water were transformed into fish.
As in the stories concerning monkeys after Four Wind and turkeys after Four Rain, this transformation establishes a relationship between the animals of the present world and the peoples who lived under an earlier Sun. Fish are not merely creatures that happened to survive the flood. In the sacred account, the former inhabitants of the world became them when the conditions of human life could no longer continue.
Some later traditions use the expression tlacamichin, commonly interpreted as human-fish or man-fish, in discussing the beings created by this transformation. Accounts vary over whether this describes all transformed people, unusually large fish descended from them, or a particular kind of being remembered from the flood.
Such differences are particularly important in a world where the oldest traditions are true without always being complete. A fisherman may regard the ordinary fish in his net as animals whose kind originated in Four Water, while stories from remote lakes may describe larger or stranger beings retaining more obvious characteristics of their former ancestry.
The existence of one belief does not require the other to be universally accepted.
Water conceals far more readily than land.
The depths of lakes and flooded caverns are difficult to examine, and the people living around them cannot always know what survives below.
The Fourth Sun did more than flood the earth.
The sky fell.
This event connects the history of Four Water with traditions concerning the raising and support of the heavens. One account states that after the flood, the gods were required to restore the division between earth and sky. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca took part in raising the heavens again, while great trees or divine supports helped establish the renewed cosmic order.
The catastrophe therefore temporarily reversed one of the fundamental acts of creation. Earth and heaven, once separated, were brought together again.
This gives the flood a significance greater than the drowning of the inhabitants of a single age. Four Water represented a partial collapse of the cosmos itself.
When the heavens were raised again, the world had to be prepared for another creation.
The present arrangement of Tlalticpac is consequently not untouched since the first making of the earth. It has endured several destructions and at least one restoration extensive enough to alter the relationship between earth and sky.
Certain ancient sacred sites are claimed to mark places where the heavens were raised or supported after the flood. Different communities identify different mountains, trees, stones, or ceremonial centers with these events, and no universal agreement exists concerning their geographical location.
The tradition remains important even where the claimed sites cannot be verified.
The world of the Fifth Sun rests upon an order that had to be restored after the waters receded.
The memory of Nahui Atl gives large bodies of water a historical importance extending beyond their ordinary use.
Lakes support fisheries, canoe traffic, agriculture, waterfowl, reeds, salt production, and trade. Rivers connect settlements and irrigate fields. Springs provide drinking water and may be regarded as sacred openings through which water emerges from within the earth. Marshes can sustain dense human communities while remaining difficult environments for outsiders to cross.
These same environments can also preserve older landscapes beneath them.
A lake may cover a valley that existed before the flood. Islands may be the exposed summits of former hills. Buildings may stand beneath water or sediment, their upper portions long since collapsed while lower chambers remain sealed. Caverns flooded during Four Water may contain deposits inaccessible except during unusual droughts or through submerged passages.
Communities living around such places frequently preserve stories explaining what lies beneath the surface. Some speak of drowned temples. Others remember former settlements, strange fish, bells or voices heard from beneath the water, or objects brought up in fishermen's nets.
Not all such stories belong to the Fourth Sun. Floods, landslides, changing shorelines, and warfare continue to destroy settlements during the present age.
The mythology nevertheless establishes that an entire inhabited world once disappeared beneath water.
Some portion of what sank may still remain there.
When the waters finally diminished, the succession of the first four Suns was complete.
Four Jaguar had ended with the destruction of the giants and the coming of jaguars. Four Wind had carried away its inhabitants and transformed them into monkeys. Four Rain had burned beneath falling fire. Four Water had drowned beneath a flood and left its people among the creatures of rivers, lakes, and seas.
The earth remained, but there was no humanity of the present kind.