Date of Award
Fall 2024
Language
English
Embargo Period
8-14-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of Anthropology
Program
Anthropology
First Advisor
Louise M. Burkhart
Committee Members
Walter Little, Marilyn A. Masson,
Keywords
Aztecs, Mesoamerica, Colonial Mexico, Mythology, Cultural Anthropology, Historical Anthropology
Subject Categories
Other Anthropology | Social and Cultural Anthropology
Abstract
In this dissertation, I study the Mexica creation story commonly known as the Five Suns Story (Abbreviation: FSS) to explain the coexistence of multiple texts of FSS, the evolution of FSS from 1400 to 1600, and its multiple functions in multiple cultural spheres of the Mexica society. In contrast to previous studies up to the 1990s, whose main goals were to cite the Five Suns Story as part of a larger research topics, reconstruct a pure pre-Columbian version of the story, and analyze specific aspects of its symbolism, I conduct an intensive study of the FSS that brings together multiple sources including Spanish and Nahuatl documents, five major monuments associated with the FSS, pre-Columbian painted documents, relevant artifacts, a few Mayan texts, cultural analogy from selected ethnographies, and a few items from modern scientific data. This approach has been influenced by academic trends known as New Conquest History and New Philology, whose focus is to understand diverse interactions among the indigenous communities and Spanish colonizers.
From an obscure background with possible influence from Mayan regions, the FSS emerged as an extension of the Mesoamerican calendar. It originally had four suns presenting the cycle of life. Later, anonymous priests of Tenochtitlan invented another version with five suns to politically justify Tenochtitlan as the center of a universal empire maintaining the fertility and immortality of the current sun through rituals. With this process, the new FSS came to contain numerous sets of symbols, like the implicit role of the god Quetzalcoatl as the Venus star. After 1503, as a result of by King Moteuczoma II’s policies to maintain his kingship, the FSS with five suns was shared among upper class members of the Mexica society through various means, possibly including circulation of painted books, rituals, religious artifact production, construction of monuments including the famous Calendar Stone, and social events like the New Fire Ceremony in 1507. As a result, the FSS with five suns functioned as a part of the imperial solar cult of Tenochtitlan.
After the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the FSS was modified by Spanish priests and a few Christianized Nahua scholars. To serve diverse purposes like the verification of Nahuas’ Christian virtues and assisting world-wide evangelization, those scholars and priests created another new FSS with motifs borrowed from Christian traditions, especially from the Book of Genesis. The FSS was transformed into an ancient epic depicting humans’ continuous survival from recurring disasters. The notion, widespread in scholarly and popular contexts, that FSS predicts an apocalyptic end to the fifth and final sun derives from this introduction of Christian elements to the story, and was not a characteristic of the pre-Columbian FSS.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Yang, Heungtae, "THE SHIFTING SUNS: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE FIVE SUNS STORY OF THE MEXICA EMPIRE AND 16TH CENTURY COLONIAL MEXICO" (2024). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 45.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/45