ABSTRACT
Fray Geronimo de Mendieta arrived in New Spain in 1554. As a speaker of Nahuatl, his lifework as a Franciscan brother was the Christian indoctrination of the Nahuas. Mendieta’s Historia, which was not published until the nineteenth century owing to a royal ban of 1577, is a valuable source on the mythology of the Pre-Conquest Nahuas. The following passages contain the story of the origins of humanity and the sun at the time when the world was created. Other sources, such as the Aztec Calendar Stone, tell that the Pre-Conquest Nahuas believed that they were living during the Fifth Sun, which they called Nahui Ollin. Standing around and waiting where the sun was supposed to rise, they bet with the quails, lobsters, butterflies, and snakes that they could not guess where the sun would rise.
