In Aztec myth, the sun only moved because the humblest god leapt into fire
The gods gathered at Teotihuacan to set the sun in motion, and the handsome favourite lost his nerve at the edge of the flames. A small god covered in boils jumped first, and time began. His shamed rival followed and became the moon. That was the Aztec account of how our present age started.
Aztec mythology belongs to the wider Mesoamerican tradition and blends many borrowed stories. Legend says the Mexica were one of seven groups who journeyed south from a northern homeland called Aztlan, which gave them the name Azteca; other versions place their origin at Chicomoztoc, the place of seven caves, or at Tamoanchan, cradle of all civilisation. Their destination, the valley around Lake Texcoco, is certain: it is the core of today's Mexico City.
Their war god Huitzilopochtli led them to an island where they saw an eagle on a nopal cactus gripping a rattlesnake, the sign a prophecy had promised. There they built Tenochtitlan on a vast artificial island, and the scene still appears on Mexico's coat of arms. Newcomers regarded as the least refined people in the valley, the Mexica absorbed what they could from neighbours, above all from the Toltecs, whom they treated as the source of all culture and tangled up with the far older city of Teotihuacan.
Mixing traditions left them with several creation stories. In the Five Suns cycle, four earlier ages each ended in catastrophe and were named for the force that destroyed them; the present fifth age, Nahui-Ollin, began with that sacrifice at Teotihuacan. Another story tells how the goddess Coatlicue tucked a ball of feathers into her waistband and conceived Huitzilopochtli. Her suspicious children plotted to kill her, but he was born fully armed on Mount Coatepec, routed his brothers, who became the stars, and cast down his sister Coyolxauhqui, linked to the moon. The tale framed him as the sun driving off the stars each dawn and was tied to the sacrifices at his temple.
The pantheon is crowded and slippery. Tlaloc ruled rain and thunder, Chalchiuhtlicue running water, Quetzalcoatl wind and wisdom in the west, Tezcatlipoca the night in the north. Because each deity was drawn as a cluster of symbolic icons rather than a fixed portrait, scholars identify them by decoding those elements.
Source: Aztec mythology
