Skip to content

The legends

The legend of the Five Suns

Illustration for The legend of the Five Suns

What it covers

The four eras before this one and how each ended, in the account the sources give.

The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why

What you have read above is this project's own summary of the legend of the five suns. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.

In Spanish the entry carries:

Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.

How to cite this page

Alma Mexica, «The legend of the Five Suns», The legends. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/legend/los-cinco-soles/