Tecciztecatl

The Legend of the Five Suns, recorded by Bernardino de Sahagun's Nahua informants in the Florentine Codex, tells how the gods gathered in darkness at Teotihuacan to choose who would sacrifice himself to become the new sun. Tecciztecatl volunteered first, and he came prepared: his offerings were rich ones, branches of quetzal feathers, balls of gold, spines of coral instead of the maguey thorns others used to draw blood, and fragrant copal instead of ordinary incense. Nanahuatzin, a small, sore-covered god without wealth or standing, offered only what he had, bundles of reeds, balls of grass, maguey spines tipped with his own blood, and scabs pulled from his own skin in place of copal.

When the fire was built up and the two gods faced it, Tecciztecatl approached first, as befit his boldness, but the heat drove him back, and he tried again three more times, failing each time to jump. Nanahuatzin, given his turn, closed his eyes and threw himself in without hesitating, and the fire consumed him at once. Shamed into following, Tecciztecatl finally leapt in behind him. Both gods rose into the sky as suns of identical brightness, and the assembled gods, refusing to let two suns burn with equal force, threw a rabbit into Tecciztecatl's face, dimming his light and leaving its silhouette printed on him forever.

Nanahuatzin's courage rather than Tecciztecatl's wealth is the story's explicit moral, and Aztec ritual practice echoed it directly: sacrifice by the poor and the humble was held to outweigh sacrifice by the rich, a lesson Nahua audiences would have heard as a comment on status itself.

Tecciztecatl's name comes from tecciztli, the conch or snail shell, and Aztec imagery shows him wearing a shell on his back, sometimes shown emerging from it, a reference to the snail's slow, hesitant retreat into its own shelter that mirrors his four failed attempts at the fire. Where Tonatiuh, the risen sun, is depicted as young, fierce and demanding, Tecciztecatl carries associations of age, coldness, and night, an old man's deity paired against a young warrior's. Some tellings identify him closely with, or as a companion to, Metztli, the more general personification of the moon inherited from earlier central Mexican tradition, and modern scholarship is divided on whether the two names describe one figure or two overlapping ones; this atlas treats the connection as unsettled rather than deciding it.

The rabbit that dims his face is one of Mesoamerica's most widespread pieces of sky lore, told across Nahua, Maya, and other Mesoamerican traditions with local variation in exactly which god throws it and why, but consistent in reading the moon's dark patches as a rabbit's outline rather than the face familiar to European tradition. The story also does real cosmological work beyond the sun and moon: Nanahuatzin's and Tecciztecatl's mutual sacrifice explains why the Aztecs held human sacrifice to be an ongoing debt owed to the sun, since even the gods needed self-sacrifice to keep the world moving, a debt renewed by the Mexica through their own ritual bloodletting and offerings long after the mythic fire had gone out.