Nanahuatzin- Aztec GodDeity"The Fifth Sun"

The Humble God

Nanahuatzin, "The Pimply One," was a small, weak deity covered in sores and boils that made him an object of pity among the other gods. His name derives from nanauatl, the Nahuatl word for the pustulent skin disease that ravaged his body, leaving him raw and weeping where the others were smooth and adorned. He had no fine garments, no jade ornaments. Among the gods at Teotihuacan, Nanahuatzin was the one no one noticed, possessing nothing but the courage that no one yet knew he carried.

The Council at Teotihuacan

After the destruction of the Fourth Sun, the world lay in total darkness. No light reached the earth; no crops could grow. The gods gathered at Teotihuacan, the great city whose name means "Place Where the Gods Were Made," to decide the fate of creation. A massive bonfire, the teotexcalli, the divine hearth, was kindled at the center of the sacred precinct, and it burned for four days and four nights while the gods fasted and bled themselves with maguey spines. The heat was immense, the flames roaring high enough to illuminate the dark world for miles around.

When the fire reached its peak, the question was posed: which god would throw himself into the blaze and become the new sun? The sacrifice required was total. Not a drop of blood or a finger's worth of pain, but complete immolation. Two stepped forward: Tecciztecatl, a proud and wealthy god adorned in turquoise and quetzal plumes, and Nanahuatzin, the diseased one, who had nothing to offer but himself.

The Offerings

For four days before the leap, both candidates made offerings to the sacred fire, building their penitential mounds side by side so that all the watching gods could see what each man brought. Tecciztecatl's offerings were magnificent: instead of ordinary fir branches, he offered quetzal feathers; instead of grass balls, balls of gold; instead of maguey spines for bloodletting, spines tipped with jade and precious red coral. Every offering proclaimed his certainty that the sun was his by right.

Nanahuatzin, having nothing of value, offered genuine fir branches gathered from the hillside, real grass balls tied with his own hands, ordinary maguey spines, and his own blood drawn with them. He also offered the scabs from his sores, the only thing he possessed that was uniquely his.

The Leap

When the fire burned at its highest, the gods called upon Tecciztecatl to throw himself in. The proud god ran toward the flames, but the heat drove him back, searing his skin before he could reach the edge. He charged a second time and stopped again. A third attempt, then a fourth, and each time he flinched and retreated. Four attempts was the sacred number. Tecciztecatl had spent his chances.

Then the gods turned to Nanahuatzin. The diseased god rose without a word. He did not pause or pray. He closed his eyes, ran forward, and threw himself into the heart of the blaze. The flames swallowed him with a great roar, and his body crackled and hissed as the fire consumed his sores, his flesh, everything he had been. An eagle plunged in after him, its feathers scorched black by the flames, which is why the eagle's plumage is dark and why the Aztecs named their greatest warriors cuauhtli, "eagles." Shamed beyond bearing, Tecciztecatl finally hurled himself after, but the fire had already begun to die. His passage through the flames was lesser. A jaguar leaped through the dying coals behind him, its fur singed with dark spots that it carries still.

Two Suns Rise

A red glow spread across the eastern horizon, and a blazing disk rose into the sky: Nanahuatzin, transformed into Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun, his diseased body purified into pure radiance. Moments later, a second sun rose beside him, equally brilliant. Tecciztecatl, who had followed through the dying flames. The world could not endure two suns. Every surface blazed white, the earth cracked, and nothing could grow under the doubled glare.

To diminish Tecciztecatl's brilliance, one of the gods seized a rabbit and hurled it at his face. The blow dimmed his light, and the imprint of the rabbit remains on the moon's surface to this day, the tochtli whose silhouette the Aztecs could trace when the full moon rose over the Valley of Mexico. Tecciztecatl became the moon, doomed to follow the sun across the sky but never to match its glory.

The Face of the Sun

As Tonatiuh, Nanahuatzin became the most demanding deity in the cosmos. The humble, sore-covered god who had asked for nothing was now a fierce solar warrior with his tongue thrust out, demanding blood and hearts to sustain his daily journey. His face glares from the center of the Sun Stone, the great carved basalt disk nearly four meters across and weighing over twenty tons, ringed by the glyphs of the four previous suns that had perished before him. Each glyph records a world that ended in catastrophe. Tonatiuh's expression is not benevolent but voracious: tongue extended to receive offerings, clawed hands gripping human hearts.

The Price of Motion

Even after rising, the newly created sun and moon hung motionless in the sky, blazing but frozen above the eastern horizon. When asked why he would not move, Tonatiuh replied that he required the blood and hearts of the gods themselves. The assembled deities looked at one another and understood what was demanded. Ehecatl went among them and sacrificed them one by one, cutting open their chests and offering their hearts to the new sun. Only then, nourished by divine blood, did Tonatiuh begin his journey across the sky, and the cycle of day and night commenced.

The sun moved because gods had died. It would stop the moment the blood ceased flowing. When Quetzalcoatl later descended to Mictlan and created humanity from ancient bones and his own blood, he built this debt into their very substance. The people of the Fifth Sun owed their existence to sacrifice and could repay it only in kind.