Second Sun

Bierhorst's translation of the Legend of the Suns names Quetzalcoatl as ruler of the Second Sun, called 4-Wind, following his defeat of Tezcatlipoca at the close of the First Sun. Humanity in this age lived under Quetzalcoatl's rule until a catastrophic wind, a hurricane of a violence the text treats as world ending rather than merely destructive, swept across the earth and scattered its people.

The survivors of that wind were transformed into monkeys, a detail the Legend of the Suns ties directly to the day sign Wind that names the age, and which Miguel Leon-Portilla reads as characteristic of the Five Suns narrative's broader logic, in which the manner of each age's ending leaves a visible trace in the natural world that followed it, whether animal, as here, or geographic, as in the floods and fires that end the ages on either side of this one. Monkeys held their own place in the Aztec calendar independent of the Five Suns story, as Ozomatli, one of the twenty named day signs of the tonalpohualli ritual calendar, associated with playfulness and artisanship; the Legend of the Suns' choice to transform the Second Sun's drowned or scattered humanity into monkeys draws on an animal already carrying established symbolic weight elsewhere in Aztec religious thought, rather than inventing new significance for the species.

The Second Sun is markedly shorter in the Legend of the Suns' telling than the accounts given for the ages around it, a brevity Leon-Portilla connects to Quetzalcoatl's wider mythological role across Aztec and earlier Mesoamerican tradition as a god of transition and departure rather than settled rule, a figure more often associated with journeys, self-sacrifice and eventual exile than with the kind of extended reign Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue are given in the two ages that follow.

Wind itself carried strong religious associations across Mesoamerica independent of the Five Suns narrative specifically, tied to breath, life force and the god Ehecatl, a wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl worshipped with his own circular temples designed to let wind pass unobstructed; the Second Sun's ending by hurricane draws on this wider association rather than inventing a new connection between Quetzalcoatl and wind solely for the purposes of the age myth. Ehecatl's temples were built with a distinctive rounded, cylindrical shape, unlike the rectangular platform temples typical of most Aztec state cults, specifically so that wind could flow around the structure without the turbulence a square building's corners would create, a piece of religious architecture that survives at several Mesoamerican sites and stands as physical evidence for how seriously this wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl was taken outside the Five Suns narrative alone.