The people of the present age do not believe that the world began with them. Before the cities, roads, fields, temples, and dynasties of the Fifth Sun, there were other creations. Their inhabitants lived beneath other Suns and experienced forms of the world that no longer exist.
These ages are remembered collectively as the Five Suns.
The word Sun in this tradition refers to more than the celestial body seen crossing the sky. Each Sun is an entire cosmic age, defined by the power that governed it, the beings who inhabited it, and the catastrophe through which it ended. Four such ages have already passed. The people now living upon Tlalticpac belong to the fifth.
The commonly preserved sequence is:
Nahui Ocelotl — Four Jaguar
Nahui Ehecatl — Four Wind
Nahui Quiahuitl — Four Rain
Nahui Atl — Four Water
Nahui Ollin — Four Movement
The names are calendrical. Nahui means four, while the second word is one of the twenty signs used in the sacred count of days. The names identify the signs associated with the endings of the worlds: Jaguar, Wind, Rain, Water, and Movement.
The sequence appears prominently in Mexica cosmology and is represented at the center of the great Sun Stone, where the signs of the four previous creations surround the sign of Ollin, Movement, belonging to the present age.
The arrangement makes an important point. The Fifth Sun did not erase the memory of the four that preceded it. The present world exists in relation to them.
No single surviving account contains every detail of the Suns in exactly the same form.
The Leyenda de los Soles, the Legend of the Suns, preserves one of the most important versions. Other accounts assign different gods to particular ages, alter the ordering of events, or describe the inhabitants in different terms. These differences were already part of the traditions from which later written sources were produced.
Within Cemanahuac, the priesthoods recognize the same difficulty. Painted histories from one city may disagree with those preserved in another. A temple dedicated to Tezcatlipoca may emphasize his role differently from one devoted to Quetzalcoatl. Ancient communities may preserve local versions of events older than the political powers that later attempted to organize them.
The disagreements do not call the existence of the former Suns into question. They concern their details.
The sequence most commonly taught places Four Jaguar first, Four Wind second, Four Rain third, and Four Water fourth, followed by the present age of Four Movement. This is the order used in the principal calendar traditions of the Fifth Sun.
Each of the earlier worlds ended violently.
Four Jaguar was destroyed through jaguars.
Four Wind ended through catastrophic wind.
Four Rain ended through a rain of fire.
Four Water disappeared beneath a great flood.
The present world is associated with movement, particularly the movement of the earth.
These destructions were not ordinary local disasters. They ended the conditions under which an entire creation existed. The world that followed was not simply a rebuilt kingdom or a new dynasty. A new Sun began.
The previous Suns are not distant countries that continue somewhere beyond the horizon. They are earlier states of creation.
Tlalticpac has been made, destroyed, changed, and restored more than once.
The mountains visible in the present age therefore need not have possessed their present forms beneath the First Sun. Rivers may follow courses that did not exist before the great flood. Volcanic fields may cover older ground. Valleys may contain sediment deposited during catastrophes remembered only in sacred histories.
The physical world itself bears the consequences of earlier ages.
This understanding is particularly important when ancient remains are discovered.
A ruin does not belong to a previous Sun merely because it is old. The Fifth Sun itself contains long histories, abandoned cities, forgotten dynasties, and settlements built over older settlements. Priests and historians are therefore cautious about claims that a structure predates the present creation.
Nevertheless, the traditions allow for the survival of material from former worlds. Stone can be buried without being destroyed. Caverns may remain sealed beneath later landscapes. Objects protected within mountains or beneath deep layers of earth may survive catastrophes that erased everything around them.
The possibility is especially important in traditions concerning the giants of an earlier age. Great constructions whose builders are unknown are sometimes attributed to the ancient giants, though such claims are disputed and often impossible to prove.
When genuine remains of earlier Suns are identified, they are not treated as the works of merely ancient foreigners. Their makers lived under different cosmic conditions.
This distinction matters to scholars, priests, rulers, and those who enter such places.
The Legend of the Suns assigns immense spans of time to the earlier creations.
The First Sun, Four Jaguar, is said in that tradition to have endured for 676 years, equivalent to thirteen cycles of fifty-two years.
Four Wind endured for 364 years, or seven fifty-two-year cycles.
Four Rain endured for 312 years, or six cycles.
Four Water is given another span of 676 years, though the details surrounding the flood and its duration vary between interpretations of the surviving text.
Such numbers should not be understood as casual estimates. The fifty-two-year cycle possessed great calendrical importance. It marked the point at which the 260-day sacred calendar and the 365-day year returned to the same combination, completing what is commonly called the Calendar Round.
Describing the earlier Suns through multiples of this cycle places cosmic history within the same system of time used to organize ritual life in the present age.
The destruction of a world is therefore not outside time.
It occurs within sacred time.
The end of a Sun does not always mean that every living thing simply ceases to exist.
Several traditions describe transformation.
The inhabitants of Four Wind are associated with monkeys after the winds destroyed their world. Those connected with Four Rain are transformed into or survive as birds, while the inhabitants of Four Water become fish during the flood. The exact details vary by source, but the repeated pattern is significant.
Destruction changes the inhabitants of the world as well as the world itself.
The beings encountered in the Fifth Sun may consequently possess histories extending beyond the present creation. An animal can carry a mythic association with people who existed before the present humanity. A species may be remembered not simply as an animal created in its current form but as the transformed remnant of an earlier people.
This does not mean that every monkey was once personally a human of Four Wind or that every fish remembers the flood. The myths concern the origin and character of whole kinds of beings.
Yet such origins affect how those beings are understood.
The natural world contains traces of cosmic history.
The Fifth and current creation is Nahui Ollin — Four Movement.
It differs from the previous Suns in several important ways, the most important of which concern the manner in which its Sun was created and the sacrifices required to set it in motion. Those events belong to the later history of the Five Suns.
For the inhabitants of Tlalticpac, however, one fact is unavoidable: the present creation is part of a sequence.
Four worlds have already ended.
Their destruction does not provide a precise date for the end of the fifth. The calendrical sign Four Movement returns repeatedly, and the surviving traditions do not establish a simple countdown by which a priest can determine the final day of the world.
The Fifth Sun may continue for generations beyond reckoning.
Its continuation is nevertheless not taken for granted.
The earlier Suns demonstrate that cosmic order can fail, that the world can be transformed, and that even a creation inhabited for centuries is not necessarily permanent. This understanding lies behind many of the rites concerned with maintaining proper relations between humanity, the gods, the earth, and the celestial powers.
The people of the Fifth Sun do not inhabit the first world.
They inhabit the world that survived after four others did not.