First Sun

John Bierhorst's translation of the Codex Chimalpopoca, a colonial-era Nahuatl manuscript compiling the text known as the Legend of the Suns, opens the cycle of world ages with Tezcatlipoca ruling as the sun, an age the text names 4-Jaguar for the day sign on which it fell. The earth in this first age was said to be inhabited by giants, a race of enormous, powerful beings distinct from ordinary humanity, who lived under Tezcatlipoca's light before catastrophe overtook them.

The age ended when jaguars, animals closely associated with Tezcatlipoca throughout Aztec religion as a form the god himself could take, devoured the giants outright, extinguishing the sun and plunging the world back into darkness before the gods set the next age in motion. Miguel Leon-Portilla's Aztec Thought and Culture situates this destruction within a broader Nahua cosmological pattern in which each sun falls to a disaster fitting the character of the deity who ruled it, a pattern the four ages that follow the First Sun continue in turn. Nahuatl sources call the giants of the First Sun quinametzin, a term that recurs across several colonial accounts of the Five Suns independent of which specific god or disaster a given source assigns to the age, suggesting the giants themselves were a comparatively stable element of the tradition even where other details, including the ruling god's identity in some variant tellings, were not.

Tezcatlipoca's rule over the First Sun sets up a rivalry that the Legend of the Suns carries through the ages that follow it: the text describes Quetzalcoatl striking Tezcatlipoca down from his place as sun to begin the Second Sun, an act of succession by force rather than the more orderly transitions later ages undergo. Leon-Portilla reads this opening confrontation between the two gods as establishing a durable opposition in Aztec religious thought, Tezcatlipoca associated with night, sorcery and sudden reversal of fortune against Quetzalcoatl's associations with wind, learning and civilized order, an opposition that recurs across Aztec myth well beyond the Five Suns narrative itself.

Not every colonial source agrees on this detail: the alternative account preserved in Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas gives a different order for which god ruled which sun and by what disaster it fell, a divergence discussed further on the Fifth Sun entry, where the two traditions' disagreement is most consequential for how the current age is understood. Tezcatlipoca's name is usually translated Smoking Mirror, a reference to the obsidian mirror he carries and to obsidian more broadly, a black volcanic glass associated across Aztec religion with night, divination and sudden reversal; jaguars, themselves creatures of the night whose spotted coats colonial writers likened to a starry sky, fit this same nocturnal and predatory character, making them a fitting agent for the First Sun's destruction rather than an arbitrary choice of animal.