The Sun that had to be fed

Across the ocean from everything you have read so far, people in the lands we now call Mexico looked up at the same Sun and understood something completely different. They did not see a driver in a chariot, or a king with a scepter, or a goddess fleeing a wolf. They saw a warrior in the middle of a battle that never ended, and they believed the battle had a price.

Mesoamerica · the Fifth SunFour suns before ours

The Aztecs and their Nahua neighbors taught that the world has already ended four times. Four ages, four suns, each one destroyed in its own cataclysm. The age we live in is the Fifth Sun, and its name is Tonatiuh, the Turquoise Lord, and it too will end one day: the sign carved into his stone is 4-Motion, the earthquake that will bring this world down like the four before it.

Here is how the Fifth Sun was born. The gods gathered in the darkness at Teotihuacan, the city of the pyramids, and built a great fire, because the world needed a sun and a sun costs something. It was Nanahuatzin, a small, humble, unglamorous god, who walked into the flames and rose into the sky burning. That is a story about what courage looks like, and the Aztecs told it straight: the Sun exists because somebody volunteered.

But there was a problem, and honestly it is my favorite problem in this book. The new Sun would not move. He hung there over the pyramids, blazing, stuck. The morning star, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, got angry and threw a dart at him to get him going, and the Sun threw it right back and hit him in the forehead, turning him to stone, the god of ice and cold. Then the gods understood. The Sun needed strength, the way they had given theirs. So the gods gave their hearts, and the Sun began to cross the sky. The Aztecs believed the gods themselves went first in sacrifice, and that everything people offered after that was only following where the gods had led.

Every single dayThe warrior's rounds

So picture the Sun's day the way they did. He is born at sunrise, an ascending eagle. He fights his way across the whole sky. He dies at sunset, a descending eagle, and is swallowed by the earth herself, and all night long he battles the dark below the world so that he can win his way back to morning. Every dawn you have ever slept through was, to them, a victory that had to be earned and helped. That help is the hard part of this chapter, and I will not hide it: the Aztecs fed their Sun with human hearts, and it was the duty of warriors to bring them. It is one of the oldest bargains people ever imagined, and one of the most terrible. Remember how it began, though, in their telling: not with a victim, but with a volunteer.

The stoneThe heaviest page in this book

In 1791, workers repaving the main square of Mexico City uncovered a buried disk of basalt more than twelve feet across and nearly three feet thick: twenty-five tons, the weight of about four grown elephants, carved around 1427 for the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. People call it the Calendar Stone, but it is not a calendar. It is a map of the cosmos: the face in the middle is the Sun himself, his tongue shaped like the blade of a sacrifice knife, and the ring around him shows the four suns that came before and were destroyed. Scholars still debate whose exact face it is, which I love, because it means the biggest, heaviest page in this whole book still holds a question open. Today it hangs in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and people stand in front of it the way you stand in front of a mountain.

And the idea was never only Aztec. The Maya before them had a sun lord, Kinich Ajaw, and the Toltecs tied their sun to the feathered serpent and the morning star. Mesoamerica had been watching the same warrior for a very long time.

Now go south, far south, down the spine of the Andes mountains, higher than eagles, where another people had the boldest idea of all. They did not say the Sun was their god. They said the Sun was their family.