Macuilli Ollin Tonatiuh:
The Fifth Sun on the Aztec Calendar

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Within the legend of the Aztec peoples there exists the idea of Four Worlds. It is said that four worlds had risen and been destroyed earlier, and that at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the world had just entered into the Fifth Sun. The concept of “Sun” appears to have been an expression for a cosmic age. As given with many aspects of oral history, the interpretations about the Four Worlds, or the Four Suns, vary according to who is doing the telling, or who is doing the listening.

One of the most outstanding examples of the legend of the Four Worlds can be found inscribed on the Aztec Calendar or Sunstone, known in Spanish, as La piedra del sol. The interpretation of the Aztec Sunstone, however, is open to discussion, as a break existed between the peoples who created that sculpture, and their descendants. Especially after the conquest of the Americas by Spain during most of the sixteenth century and later into the nineteenth century, the social knowledge of the peoples of the Americas was lost in many respects. To what degree the ancient knowledge had been lost even before the Spanish conquest can only be surmised, as even less documentation exists in this regard. However, by some accounts, pyramidal sites like Teotihuacan and Palenque had been long abandoned before the coming of the Spaniards to the Americas.

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