After the destruction of Four Jaguar, the world entered its second remembered age, Nahui Ehecatl, Four Wind. In the chronology preserved by the Leyenda de los Soles, this Sun endured for 364 years, equivalent to seven cycles of fifty-two years.
The inhabitants of the new age lived upon the same Tlalticpac that had endured the destruction of the First Sun, although the conditions of the world had changed. The succession of the Suns did not create a separate earth each time. The landscape inherited the consequences of what had happened before, while new peoples occupied regions once inhabited by those who had disappeared.
The Leyenda de los Soles records that the people of Four Wind ate a food identified as Twelve Snake. The meaning of this expression is less certain than the account of their destruction, but the text preserves it as the nourishment belonging to their age. As with the people of Four Jaguar, they lived before maize became the defining food of the humanity of the present Sun.
The second age eventually ended on a day bearing the sign Four Wind, in a year named One Flint. The wind became so violent that it carried away the inhabitants together with their houses and trees. As the people were swept away, they were transformed into monkeys.
Their transformation became one of the principal explanations for the presence of monkeys in the later world.
Several traditions associate the Second Sun with Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. His connection with this age is particularly appropriate because Quetzalcoatl possesses an important aspect as Ehecatl, the god of wind.
Ehecatl is not usually treated as an entirely separate divine being from Quetzalcoatl. The name identifies Quetzalcoatl in his relationship with moving air, breath, and the winds that cross Tlalticpac. In images he can be distinguished by a projecting, beaklike red mask through which the wind is expressed. This form appears frequently enough that Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl is often named as a single divine identity.
Wind occupies an important position within the natural order because it precedes and accompanies rain. Before clouds break and water reaches the fields, winds move across the land. Ehecatl consequently participates not only in destructive storms but also in the arrival of the rains upon which agriculture depends.
This dual character is essential. The wind that destroyed the Second Sun is not evidence that Ehecatl is simply a god of disaster. The same force that tears roofs from buildings and uproots trees also carries clouds, cools the earth, scatters seeds, and makes movement possible in the atmosphere.
The gods of Cemanahuac are rarely confined to a single human judgment of their powers. A necessary force can become destructive when its proper measure is exceeded.
The end of Four Wind was a destruction of exceptional violence. The surviving account does not describe an ordinary seasonal storm or a single region struck by bad weather. Trees were torn from the earth and houses were carried away together with their inhabitants.
The catastrophe altered the surface of Tlalticpac. Settlements disappeared, forests were broken, and places known to the people of the Second Sun could no longer have remained as they had been before. The degree of change cannot be reconstructed precisely from the sacred histories, but the account makes clear that the wind destroyed both human communities and the landscape surrounding them.
This distinction is important to those who study the oldest portions of the present world. Remains associated with Four Wind are not expected to resemble intact cities abandoned by their inhabitants. Structures exposed to the catastrophe may have been scattered, collapsed, or buried beneath material deposited after the age ended. Only places protected by unusual terrain could reasonably preserve substantial remains.
Caves, deeply cut valleys, chambers constructed within hills, and foundations protected beneath later deposits offer more plausible places for material from the Second Sun to have survived. Even there, proving such an age is difficult. The Fifth Sun has endured long enough to possess ruins of considerable antiquity, and destruction by wind alone cannot establish that a site belongs to Four Wind.
Sacred histories therefore provide a clearer account of the age than archaeology.
The transformation of the inhabitants into monkeys is among the most distinctive features of Nahui Ehecatl.
The Leyenda de los Soles states plainly that those carried away by the wind became monkeys. Later summaries of the Five Suns repeat the same transformation, making monkeys living reminders of the second creation.
This does not require the people of the Fifth Sun to regard every monkey as an individual ancient person who survived unchanged for thousands of years. The transformation concerns the origin of their kind. Monkeys descend from or embody the transformed humanity of Four Wind and therefore occupy a place in sacred history different from animals that have no such association.
Their physical resemblance to human beings makes the connection particularly apparent. They possess hands capable of grasping, expressive faces, social behavior, curiosity, and movements that can appear remarkably human. Yet they inhabit trees and forests rather than cities and cultivated fields.
In the mythology of the Suns, this resemblance is not accidental.
The people of Four Wind were not preserved as another nation alongside later humanity. Their form was changed. What had been human became something that remained close enough to humanity to recall its origin while no longer belonging to human society.
Monkeys acquired other religious and artistic meanings during the later history of Mesoamerica and should not be understood only through the destruction of the Second Sun. They appear in associations with performance, music, dance, pleasure, artistic skill, and particular calendrical signs. The mythology of Four Wind forms one layer of a much wider body of meaning.
Nevertheless, their origin in the destruction of the Second Sun remained part of the remembered history of creation.
The end of Nahui Ehecatl did not diminish the importance of the wind in the present world.
Temples dedicated to Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl are notable for their rounded or circular forms. Archaeological examples show circular sanctuaries and temple platforms associated with the wind god, a form distinct from the rectangular plans common to many other temples. Within the religious architecture of the Fifth Sun, the shape itself identifies the special character of Ehecatl's cult.
Wind is also experienced differently across the varied landscapes of Tlalticpac. Mountain passes funnel strong currents between valleys. Lake basins produce their own changing winds. Coastal regions receive storms from great waters, while high ground can remain exposed to weather that settlements below scarcely feel. Seasonal winds affect travel, agriculture, hunting, and the movement of smoke and cloud.
These ordinary experiences exist alongside the remembered catastrophe of Four Wind.
A severe storm is not automatically interpreted as the return of the Second Sun's destruction. Communities accustomed to seasonal weather know the difference between ordinary danger and cosmic upheaval. At the same time, the mythology provides a measure against which extraordinary winds are understood. Storms powerful enough to level forests or destroy entire settlements naturally invite comparison with the age that ended in the same manner.
Priests of Ehecatl study such events with particular care, especially when destructive winds coincide with unusual calendrical signs or celestial conditions.
Because the campaign world occupies a single Tlalticpac, any surviving traces of Four Wind exist within the same geography inhabited during the Fifth Sun.
They may lie beneath later cities, within cave systems, under accumulated earth, or in remote portions of the landscape where later settlement never completely replaced what came before. A ruined foundation found beneath a modern temple may have several periods of construction above it, only the deepest of which could conceivably approach the age of an earlier Sun.
Some traditions attribute oddly shaped stones, ancient foundations, or inaccessible chambers to former worlds, but such claims are not accepted without question. Communities frequently assign forgotten structures to gods, giants, or ancient peoples when their actual builders have passed from memory.
The transformation of the inhabitants of Four Wind provides another kind of survival. The age remains present not only through possible ruins but through the living creatures believed to descend from its people.
In this sense, the former Suns have never vanished completely from Tlalticpac. Their cities may be lost, but elements of their histories remain within the animals, landscape, ritual traditions, and sacred calendar of the present age.
When Four Wind ended, the world continued.
The next Sun would be associated with Tlaloc, and its destruction would come not through darkness or wind, but through a rain that burned.