Why
these numbers should have been chosen, no one has guessed. It has been
looked for in combinations of numbers connected with the calendar, but
so far in vain.
While most authorities agree as to the character of the destructions
which terminated the suns, they vary much as to their sequence. Water,
winds, fire, and hunger, are the agencies, and in one Codex (Vaticanus)
occur in this order. Gama gives the sequence, hunger, winds, fire, and
water; Humboldt hunger, fire, winds, and water; Boturini water, hunger,
winds, fire. As the cycle ending by a famine, is called the Age of
Earth, Ternaux-Compans, the distinguished French _Americaniste_, has
imagined that the four Suns correspond mystically to the domination
exercised in turn over the world by its four constituent elements. But
proof is wanting that Aztec philosophers knew the theory on which this
explanation reposes.
Baron Humboldt suggested that the suns were "fictions of mythological
astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great
revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested
by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while
the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them
as exaggerated references to historical events.
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