Leyenda de los Soles — Legend of the Five Suns
c. 1400–1521 CE (written); oral tradition older · Pre-Columbian (Aztec/Mexica) · Valley of Mexico (Tenochtitlan)
*This translation is not currently available.* Leyenda de los Soles ("Legend of the Suns") is a sixteenth-century Nahuatl manuscript recounting the Aztec cosmogony of successive worlds destroyed and reborn. No complete pre-1929 English translation of the Nahuatl text exists; later renderings remain under copyright. We are actively exploring ways to include this text. Subscribe to our email list at anunnaki.ai for updates when new texts are added.
notes
The Leyenda de los Soles (Legend of the Five Suns) is a Nahuatl text preserved in the Codex Chimalpopoca, a colonial-period manuscript compiled around 1558 CE recording Aztec (Mexica) mythology and history. It records the Aztec doctrine of the Five Suns — five successive cosmic ages, each created and destroyed by a different catastrophe, with the present world being the fifth. Each age corresponds to a day-sign: Jaguar, Wind, Rain, Water, and Movement (Earthquake). The mythology of the Fifth Sun — created at Teotihuacan when the humble god Nanahuatzin threw himself into the sacrificial fire while the proud Tecuciztecatl hesitated — explains both the movement of the sun (which required the self-sacrifice of the gods to set in motion) and the Aztec institution of human sacrifice (which continued the divine act of blood-giving that powered the cosmos). This creation narrative has deep structural parallels with other world-creation myths in this archive: the repeated failed attempts at creating the proper cosmic order (Popol Vuh), the sacrifice of a primordial being to create the world (Purusha Sukta, Enuma Elish with Tiamat), and the requirement of divine sacrifice to sustain life. Translation draws on Daniel Brinton, Rig Veda Americanus (1890) and composite scholarly tradition. Public domain. Presented here as selected passages.
currently held: Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City (Codex Chimalpopoca)
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