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Age of water aztec3/29/2023 ![]() ![]() Such sacrifices ensured that the universe would continue, and not come to an end. These sacrifices were very important, especially the sacrifice performed every 52 years as part of the New Fire ceremony. ![]() It was probably set horizontally into the ground, serving as a platform on which offerings were made. ![]() 22 Indeed, the Calendar Stone itself is thought to be a sacrificial stone. When these victim-gods were sacrificed, they were helping to recreate the primordial sacrifices at Teotihuacan. By wearing these costumes, sacrificial victims were thought to be transformed into the gods themselves (see the Nahua “Clothing” tutorial). Many Aztec sacrifices involved dressing humans up in the costumes of different deities. Because of this sacrifice at the beginning of time, humans were in turn obliged to repay the gods with sacrifices in return. In order to set these celestial bodies into motion, all of the other gods sacrificed themselves in acts of divine suicide. However, once these bodies rose into the sky, they did not move any more. They then rose into the sky as the Sun and the Moon. Two gods sacrificed themselves by throwing themselves on a sacrificial fire. There, in the year 13 Reed (the year sign shown in a cartouche on the outer rim of the Calendar stone, Figure 6), the gods gathered in the pre-dawn darkness. According to Aztec beliefs, this sun was created through sacrifices performed by the gods in the ruins of Teotihuacan. This face is embedded at the center of an X-shaped Motion glyph, which is in turn surrounded by 4 circles, indicating the date of 4 Motion (Figure 14). The circular face looking out from the middle of the stone is one of the forms of the Sun God, Tonatiuh. This is the symbol at the very center of the Calendar stone. The age in which the Aztecs lived was lit by a sun called 4 Motion. The 4 Rain age was destroyed by a rain of fire, and the 4 Water age was destroyed by a flood. The 4 Wind age ended with deadly hurricanes. The 4 Jaguar age ended when supernatural jaguars descended onto the earth and killed everything living on it. Each of these previous ages ended in an apocalypse, during which the beings who lived in them were destroyed. Each glyphic sign (a spotted jaguar head, the red-beaked visage of the Wind god) is surrounded by four circles, indicating the 4- value (Figure 13). The names of these four suns are carved onto the Calendar stone, and surround its central, circular face. ![]() The four suns which lit the sky before the present sun were named 4 Jaguar, 4 Wind, 4 Rain, and 4 Water. Each solar name corresponded to the day on which the age of creation lit by that sun was destroyed. Each of these suns was given a name using the signs of the tonalpohualli. 21 Each of these previous Ages of Creation had been lit by a different sun. 20 One sixteenth-century source reports that these ages had lasted for different periods of time: 676 years, 676 years again, 364 years, and 312 years. 19Īccording to Aztec beliefs, four Ages of Creation had existed before the present. In colonial sources, the giant pyramids at Teotihuacan were said to have been built by giants. Physical evidence of those destroyed ages of creation was provided by mastodon bones (believed to be the bones of a vanished race of giants) and by archaeological ruins, such as the massive pyramids at the Classic site of Teotihuacan, just to the north of Tenochtitlan (Figure 12). The Aztecs-like other indigenous groups in Postclassic Mesoamerica, including the Quiché Maya and the Ñudzavui-believed that the world had been created and destroyed a number of times before the “present.” Several Ages of Creation existed before the current Age. ![]()
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