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Soustelle - Aztecs and Mexica - The end of the world
Identifier
011477
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Daily Life of the Aztecs – Jacques Soustelle
The Mexicans, like some other Central-American peoples, believed that several successive worlds had existed before ours and that each of them had fallen in ruins amid cataclysms in which mankind had been wiped out. These were the'four suns'; and the age in which we live is the fifth.
Each of these 'suns' is shown on monuments such as the Atztec calendar or the Stone of the Suns by a date, a date which is that of its end and which evokes the nature of the catastrophe which ended it: in this way the fourth epoch, for example, the 'sun of the water', which was drowned in a kind of Flood, has the date naui atl,' four - water'.
Our world will have the same fate: its destiny is fixed by the date which has, as one might say, branded it at birth - the date naui ollin, at which our sun first began to move.
The glyph ollin, is shaped like a Saint Andrew's cross and shares the centre of the Aztec calendar with the sun-god’s visage.
It has the double meaning of movement and earthquake