Tonatiuh- Aztec GodDeity"The Sun God"

The Fifth Sun

At the center of the Sun Stone, Tonatiuh's face stares outward: wrinkled, fierce, tongue thrust forward in demand for the blood and hearts that keep him burning. His clawed hands grasp human hearts. Around his face, the glyphs of four previous suns record their catastrophic ends: jaguar, wind, fire, flood. His own glyph is Nahui Ollin, Four Movement. It prophesies his death in earthquakes.

Born from Fire

Tonatiuh was not always the sun. He began as Nanahuatzin, a diseased and humble god covered in sores. When the gods gathered at Teotihuacan to create a new sun, Nanahuatzin threw himself into the sacred bonfire without hesitation while the proud Tecciztecatl flinched four times. The flames consumed the diseased body and from them rose Tonatiuh, blazing with a light the cosmos had never seen. Tecciztecatl followed, but a rabbit hurled at his face dimmed him, and he became the moon.

Even transformed, the sun hung motionless above the horizon. He demanded blood before he would move. Quetzalcoatl went among the assembled gods with an obsidian blade, cutting out their hearts one by one. With the last heart offered, Tonatiuh began to cross the sky. The debt was set: he would move only so long as hearts continued to feed him.

The Daily War

Each dawn Tonatiuh rises in the east, having fought his way through the underworld all night. At first light he vanquishes Coyolxauhqui the moon and drives the four hundred stars from the sky. The Nahuatl word for sunrise, cuauhtlehuanitl, means "eagle who rises."

Through the day he crosses the sky attended by the spirits of warriors who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone. They sing and clash their shields in his honor. Women who died in childbirth, the cihuateteo, carry the sun from the zenith down to the western horizon. By evening the earth monster Tlaltecuhtli opens her great mouth and swallows the sun whole, and Tonatiuh plunges into Mictlan's darkness to fight through until dawn. Without the nourishment of human hearts, the sun would weaken in that darkness and fail to rise.

After four years of attendance, the warrior-dead and the cihuateteo transform into hummingbirds and butterflies, drinking nectar in the gardens of Tamoanchan.

The New Fire

Every fifty-two years, the Aztec world rehearsed its own death. On the night when the old calendar cycle ended and the new one was not yet certain to begin, every fire throughout the empire was extinguished. Tenochtitlan went dark. Hearths that had burned for decades were emptied of their coals. Pregnant women were locked indoors behind masks of maguey leaves, lest they transform into monsters in the darkness. Children were kept awake and pinched to prevent them from becoming mice in their sleep. The people climbed to their rooftops and stared at the Pleiades. If the star cluster crossed the meridian, the world would endure another cycle.

On a hill called Huixachtlan outside the city, priests sacrificed a captive and kindled a new fire in the cavity of his opened chest. If the flame caught and held, runners seized torches and sprinted through the night to carry the fire to every temple, every hearth, every home in the empire. The world breathed again. Light returned. Tonatiuh would rise. But the memory of that night of total darkness stayed with the Aztecs until the next cycle came due, and they extinguished their fires once more.

Nahui Ollin

The Aztecs knew their sun would die. The glyph Nahui Ollin named both the current age and its destined end: earthquakes would shake the world apart, and the tzitzimimeh, skeletal star demons lurking at the edges of the cosmos, would descend to devour the living. Solar eclipses brought this terror to life. The darkness that swallowed the sun might be permanent. Warriors rushed to the temples, captives were sacrificed with desperate urgency, and the empire held its breath until the sun's disk emerged from shadow.