A myth on Mexico's flag
The flag of Mexico shows an eagle perched on a cactus, eating a snake, and it comes straight from an Aztec story. The Mexica, as the Aztecs called themselves, wandered for generations until their god Huitzilopochtli told them to settle wherever they saw exactly that sight. They found it on a swampy island in a lake and founded their capital there, traditionally in 1325. That city, Tenochtitlan, now lies beneath Mexico City; our Aztecs puzzle in History tells how it was built.
Four worlds before this one
Aztec CREATION stories say the world had already been made and destroyed four times. Each age had its own sun, and each ended badly: one world was eaten by jaguars, one was blown away by wind and its people turned into monkeys, one burned under a rain of fire, and one drowned in a flood whose people became fish. We live under the fifth sun, which is due to end in earthquakes.
Making the fifth sun took courage. The gods gathered around a great fire at Teotihuacan, and the humblest of them, a small, sickly god called Nanahuatzin, leapt in and rose as the new sun, TONATIUH. But the sun would not move until the other gods gave up their own lives to set it going. That idea — that the sun had to be fed to keep rising — lay behind the offerings, including human SACRIFICE, at the heart of Aztec religion.
Bones dropped in the underworld
To make people for the new world, QUETZALCOATL, the FEATHERED serpent, went down to MICTLAN, the UNDERWORLD, to fetch the bones of the people who had lived before. The lord of the dead let him take them only after a set of trick tests, then had a pit dug in his path. QUETZALCOATL fell, the bones scattered and broke, and the pieces he gathered up were of different lengths — the story's reason for people coming in different sizes. The gods gave their own blood to bring the bones to life. In some tellings the dog-headed god XOLOTL went with him, and Mexico's hairless dog, the xoloitzcuintli, is named after him.
The Sun Stone is not a calendar
The most famous Aztec carving, the SUNSTONE, is often called the Aztec calendar, but nobody used it to tell the date. It is a disc of basalt about 3.6 metres across and weighing around 24 tonnes, carved with the four destroyed worlds circling a face usually identified as TONATIUH: a monument to the story of the suns, not a working calendar. Buried after the Spanish conquest, it was dug up in 1790 while Mexico City's main square was being repaved.
A statue of the earth goddess COATLICUE, wearing a skirt of woven snakes, was found nearby the same year and unsettled people so much that it was buried again for a while. Both now stand in Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. NAHUATL, the Aztecs' language, is still spoken by well over a million people in Mexico today.