What do you think about this?
The Aztecs believed that the world has been destroyed four times already, and we are living in the fifth age.
Each of the previous worlds, what they called Suns, lasted thousands of years before ending in catastrophe. The first Sun was destroyed by jaguars, the wild animals of the earth turning on the people. The second was unmade by winds, hurricanes so violent they erased everything. The third ended in a rain of fire. The fourth ended in a flood that drowned the planet and turned the survivors into fish. Each time, the gods rebuilt and tried again.
The cycle is preserved in the Codex Boturini and the Codex Vaticanus A, both painted before the Spanish destruction of the Aztec libraries. It is carved into the Sun Stone, the twenty four ton basalt monolith dug up under the Zocalo in 1790 and now in the National Museum in Mexico City. The five ages stare back from the center of that disk in symbols Aztec priests still recognized when the Spanish arrived.
We are in the Fifth Sun, Ollintonatiuh, the Sun of Movement. The Aztecs predicted it would end in earthquakes.
The strange part is who else carries this story. The Hopi tradition describes four prior worlds and a current fifth age. The Maya Long Count tracks vast cycles of destruction and renewal. The Mesopotamian flood myth, the biblical flood, the Hindu yugas, all describe a planet that has been wiped clean before, sometimes more than once, by water and by fire.
Is it possible the people of the ancient world were not making any of this up, but trying to tell us about something that actually happened?
