The third remembered age is Nahui Quiahuitl, Four Rain. In the chronology preserved by the Leyenda de los Soles, it endured for 312 years, equivalent to six cycles of fifty-two years.
The name of the age requires some explanation. Quiahuitl means rain, but the rain that ended this world was not water. The final day of Four Rain brought fire from the sky, consuming its inhabitants, their houses, and even the Sun that governed the age.
Several Nahua traditions associate the Third Sun with Tlaloc, the ancient god of rain, storms, lightning, mountains, and agricultural fertility. This association may initially appear contradictory. Tlaloc is most familiar as the giver of water upon which maize and human life depend, yet the world over which he presided ended in a rain of fire.
The contradiction is only apparent.
Tlaloc and the powers associated with him govern more than gentle rainfall. Rain may nourish a field or flatten it. Hail can ruin a crop. Lightning can kill a traveler or ignite dry vegetation. Storms may bring abundance to one valley and destruction to another. In painted ritual books, the rains associated with the Tlaloque include both beneficial and harmful forms. The divine control of rain therefore includes its dangerous manifestations as well as those desired by farmers.
The destruction of Four Rain represents this destructive capacity on the scale of an entire cosmic age.
Tlaloc belongs among the oldest and most widely revered gods of Mesoamerica. His cult and characteristic imagery existed long before the rise of the Mexica, and related rain deities appear across many cultures of central Mexico.
He is closely associated with mountains, where clouds gather and from which rain and streams descend. The interiors of mountains were understood as containing water, seeds, food, and other forms of wealth necessary for life. The smaller rain beings commonly called the Tlaloque participate in releasing these waters and in producing different kinds of weather.
This relationship helps explain why the powers of Tlaloc cannot be reduced to water alone. Lightning, thunder, hail, storms, clouds, and the dangerous forces accompanying rain all belong within the same divine sphere.
Agriculture depends upon these powers but cannot control them.
The farmer needs rain in the proper quantity and at the proper time. Too little produces drought. Too much destroys fields. Hail breaks young plants. Lightning strikes trees and buildings. Violent storms wash cultivated soil from slopes and cause lakes and rivers to rise beyond their banks.
The rain god therefore embodies both abundance and uncertainty.
This same complexity appears in the history of the Third Sun.
The Leyenda de los Soles states that the people of Four Rain were destroyed when fire rained upon them for a single day. The people burned, the Sun burned, and their houses burned with them.
Their appointed nourishment was called Chicome Tecpatl — Seven Flint.
The destruction occurred in a year One Flint, on a day bearing the sign Four Rain.
Other Nahua descriptions add remarkable details to the catastrophe. They speak not only of fire falling from the heavens but of sand, stones, and heated rock. Tezontle—the porous volcanic stone commonly used in construction during the Fifth Sun—is said in one account to have boiled or formed during this destruction. Rocks reddened under the heat, while fragments of stone fell across the land.
These descriptions give Four Rain a character strongly resembling an immense volcanic catastrophe.
For the inhabitants of Cemanahuac, the distinction between divine fire and volcanic eruption is unnecessary. Volcanoes themselves belong to the sacred landscape. Fire emerging from mountains, stones falling from the sky, ash darkening the air, and incandescent material descending upon settlements can all be understood simultaneously as physical events and manifestations of divine power.
The sacred account does not require one explanation to exclude the other.
The people of the Third Sun experienced the destruction as a rain of fire.
Its traces may remain in the volcanic landscape of the Fifth.
Of the first three destructions, Four Rain would have left some of the clearest marks upon the physical surface of Tlalticpac.
Wind scatters and breaks.
Jaguars destroy living beings.
Fire can bury what it destroys beneath material that remains for centuries.
A settlement overtaken by volcanic ash or falling stone may disappear from the surface while portions of it survive below. Lava can seal caves and valleys. New rock can cover earlier soils. Forests burn and later return over ground whose former appearance has been completely altered.
This allows the Third Sun to remain materially present on the single mapped world of Tlalticpac without requiring any separate realm.
Large volcanic regions may contain layers belonging to several periods of habitation. A Fifth Sun settlement might occupy a valley whose older ground lies beneath meters of hardened ash. A temple may have been built beside a lava field without its builders knowing what lies beneath it. Natural caves formed by volcanic activity can intersect older chambers or surfaces that became inaccessible after an eruption.
Not every ancient object found beneath volcanic deposits belongs to Four Rain. Eruptions continue during the Fifth Sun, and volcanic landscapes possess histories of their own. Determining whether something genuinely predates the present Sun requires far more than finding it beneath old lava.
Nevertheless, the manner in which Four Rain ended makes buried preservation particularly plausible.
Entire portions of the Third Sun may remain beneath the present landscape, not intact in the sense of an untouched city, but sealed within the geological changes produced by its destruction.
According to the Leyenda de los Soles, the inhabitants of Four Rain were transformed into turkeys as their world burned.
The Nahuatl text makes use of a wordplay involving pipiltin, which can refer to noble children or young people and is connected in the account with the young of turkeys. Rafael Tena's translation preserves this linguistic feature, showing that the transformation was remembered not simply as a change of shape but through language that remained meaningful to later Nahua speakers.
Other traditions preserve a broader set of transformations.
The Codex Vaticanus A depicts or describes the people of the Third Sun becoming dogs, turkeys, and butterflies during the rain of fire. Another simplified telling states that the survivors became birds.
These variations are retained in the traditions of Cemanahuac rather than reduced to a single artificial explanation.
The most widely taught account holds that the principal inhabitants became turkeys. Regional priesthoods maintain additional traditions in which other creatures also descend from those who survived or were transformed during the catastrophe.
As with the monkeys of Four Wind, this does not require each living turkey to possess the mind or memories of a person from the Third Sun. The transformation concerns the sacred origin of the species or of particular ancestral kinds.
The turkey therefore carries an ancestry extending into a world that no longer exists.
This association does not prevent people of the Fifth Sun from raising, hunting, trading, or eating turkeys. Sacred origin and practical use are not mutually exclusive. Animals important to human life may simultaneously possess divine or mythological histories.
The memory of Four Rain is especially strong in regions dominated by volcanoes.
The highlands of Tlalticpac contain mountains that smoke, vents that release sulfurous gases, slopes covered in black stone, and valleys whose fertile soils were created partly from ancient volcanic material. Communities living near such mountains understand that the same land capable of producing rich crops can also bury fields and settlements.
Volcanic stone is widely useful. Tezontle, dark and porous, can be quarried for construction. Obsidian, formed through volcanic processes, produces cutting edges of extraordinary sharpness and occupies an important place in warfare, ritual, craft, and trade. The landscapes associated with fire are therefore sources of wealth as well as danger.
This again reflects a larger principle of Nahua cosmology.
The forces that destroy are not necessarily separate from those that sustain civilization.
Fire cooks food and consumes houses.
Volcanic earth produces fertile fields and can bury them.
Obsidian supplies blades and weapons capable of drawing blood.
Tlaloc sends rain that sustains maize and storms that ruin it.
The Third Sun belongs to this same pattern. Its destruction was terrible because the ordinary powers of the world exceeded the conditions under which life could continue.
Of all claims concerning earlier Suns, those associated with Four Rain are among the easiest to mistake for ordinary ancient ruins.
A building beneath volcanic deposits may belong to the Fifth Sun and merely predate a later eruption. A naturally formed chamber may be incorrectly described as a Third Sun structure. Strange animal remains may be assigned mythological importance simply because their species is unfamiliar.
Learned priests and historians therefore treat such claims cautiously.
More convincing evidence would require several features together: material demonstrably older than known Fifth Sun settlements, architecture inconsistent with later traditions, remains corresponding with the beings associated with the age, and geological evidence placing the site beneath deposits attributed to the great destruction.