The earliest of the four lost ages is remembered as Nahui Ocelotl, Four Jaguar. In the sequence preserved by the Leyenda de los Soles, it endured for 676 years, or thirteen complete periods of fifty-two years. Its name derives from the day sign on which its inhabitants finally perished.
Other Nahua accounts associate this first age with Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror. In these traditions Tezcatlipoca served as the Sun before Quetzalcoatl displaced him, beginning the pattern of rivalry and succession that continued through the following creations.
The world beneath this first Sun was not identical to the Tlalticpac of the present age. Later descriptions associate it particularly with earth, darkness, and a humanity remembered for extraordinary size. Mountains, forests, caves, and the other features established during creation already existed, but the peoples living among them belonged to an order of life that disappeared with their Sun.
The Leyenda de los Soles records that the inhabitants subsisted on chicome malinalli, Seven Grass. Other accounts identify their food with wild seeds or nuts rather than the cultivated maize upon which the peoples of the Fifth Sun depend. This difference is significant within the broader cycle of creation. The people of each former Sun are associated with particular foods, while the discovery of maize belongs to the creation and sustenance of the present humanity.
Four Jaguar was therefore an inhabited world, but not yet the human world known today.
The association between the First Sun and Tezcatlipoca appears most clearly in accounts that arrange the early worlds around the rivalry between Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl.
Tezcatlipoca is one of the most complex gods of the Nahua pantheon. He is associated with night, obsidian, rulership, conflict, divination, change, sorcery, fate, and the jaguar. His name, commonly translated as Smoking Mirror, refers to the polished obsidian mirror that forms one of his principal signs.
As ruler of the First Sun, he occupied a position later taken by other gods in successive creations. The sources do not describe this age as a kingdom directly governed from a celestial throne, nor should the term Sun be understood merely as a title for political rule. Tezcatlipoca himself constituted or embodied the solar power of the age.
This arrangement did not last.
In one important account, Quetzalcoatl struck Tezcatlipoca and cast him from his place as the Sun. The attack ended Tezcatlipoca's celestial rule and initiated the destruction of the first creation. Tezcatlipoca entered the water and emerged in the form of a jaguar, an animal already closely associated with him.
The jaguar consequently became both the sign and the means by which the age ended.
The conflict should not be understood as the defeat of an evil god by a good one. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca appear repeatedly as both collaborators and opponents. Together they participate in creating the earth and raising the heavens; elsewhere their rivalry brings entire cosmic ages to an end. Neither possesses a fixed moral role comparable to the opposing divine powers found in some other religious traditions.
The transition between Suns is instead produced by divine conflict and change.
Several traditions describe the inhabitants of the earliest world as giants, beings much larger and stronger than the people of the present age.
These giants are often discussed alongside the Quinametzin, the ancient giants remembered in later Nahua traditions. The identification is not completely straightforward. Some accounts place giants in the world destroyed by jaguars, while traditions specifically naming the Quinametzin sometimes associate them with a different former Sun. Later stories also attribute ancient monuments and cities to giants without always placing those builders clearly within the Five Suns chronology.
For this reason, the traditions of Cemanahuac distinguish between the giants of the former Suns and claims concerning particular Quinametzin unless a source clearly identifies them as the same people.
What survives consistently is the belief that giants belonged to an earlier stage of the world.
Descriptions emphasize their physical power. In later accounts they could pull up trees with their hands and move stones that present humans could scarcely manage. Monumental structures whose true builders had been forgotten were consequently sometimes attributed to giants. Teotihuacan and the enormous pyramid at Cholula were among the places around which such traditions developed, although different stories assign their construction to different beings and periods.
The existence of these traditions has an important consequence for the geography of the Fifth Sun. Not every structure found upon Tlalticpac was necessarily created by the peoples now inhabiting it. Old foundations, unusually massive stones, buried ceremonial spaces, and settlements whose original histories have disappeared can remain upon the same earthly surface through which later peoples travel.
Most are simply ancient works of the Fifth Sun.
A smaller number may belong to traditions considerably older.
Determining the difference is rarely simple.
According to the Leyenda de los Soles, the destruction of the first inhabitants did not occur in a single instant. The text states that they began to be devoured by jaguars on a day Four Jaguar, and that thirteen years passed before they had finally disappeared. The Sun itself then ended.
Other versions describe the catastrophe more dramatically, connecting the fall of Tezcatlipoca directly with the appearance of the jaguars. After Quetzalcoatl cast him down, Tezcatlipoca took jaguar form, and jaguars overran the inhabited world.
In either version, Nahui Ocelotl ended through predation.
The jaguar already occupied an exceptional place in Mesoamerican thought. It is the largest terrestrial predator of the region, capable of moving through forest and darkness with little sound and powerful enough to kill prey considerably larger than itself. Its spotted hide, nocturnal habits, strength, and association with caves and darkness made it an important image of supernatural and political power long before the rise of the Mexica.
Its connection with Tezcatlipoca strengthened these associations further.
The jaguar therefore remained present in the Fifth Sun as an ordinary living animal and as a creature carrying the memory of an earlier cosmic destruction. Jaguar imagery appears in warfare, rulership, divine costume, ritual equipment, and the names or identities of supernatural beings.
The animal seen in the forests of the present world is not itself a survivor of Four Jaguar in any simple sense. Jaguars reproduce and die like other creatures. Yet their kind occupies a place in sacred history that ordinary predators do not.
They were the agents through which an entire age came to an end.
The destruction of Four Jaguar ended its people and its Sun, but it did not return creation to complete nothingness.
The earth continued.
This distinction is essential to understanding the Five Suns on the physical world of Tlalticpac. The Suns are successive ages of the same cosmic creation, repeatedly altered by catastrophe rather than five separate worlds existing alongside one another. When an age ends, portions of the landscape can be transformed, buried, broken, flooded, burned, or covered by what follows.
Material from the First Sun may therefore survive within the geography of the present world.
A chamber sealed beneath a later temple does not require another plane to reach it. A stone foundation exposed by erosion may simply lie beneath newer soil. A cavern can preserve objects or remains from periods whose surface settlements disappeared long ago. Later peoples may build directly over places already ancient when the Fifth Sun began.
Such survivals are exceptional, and age alone does not establish their origin. The Fifth Sun has its own long history, and exaggerated claims about giant builders are common wherever the true builders of an old monument have been forgotten.
The first age is consequently known more securely through sacred history than through ruins.
Its end, however, is remembered without ambiguity in the name by which it is still known:
Nahui Ocelotl — Four Jaguar.
After its destruction, another Sun arose, associated not with the jaguar or the earth, but with Quetzalcoatl and the power of wind.