Note 5 — Chapter II · COSMOGONY

The interpreter of the Codex Vaticanus states that “in the first age” (or “Sun,” as these periods were called by the Nahua of Mexico) “water reigned until at last it destroyed the world.… This age, according to their computation, lasted 4,008 years, and on the occurrence of that great deluge they say that men were changed into fish, named Tlacamichin, which signifies men-fish.”5 The second age, he tells us, lasted for 4,010 years and the world was ended by the force of violent winds, the catastrophe concluding by the transformation of men into apes. The third age endured for 4,801 years and ended in a universal fire, and in the fourth, which occupied 5,042 years, the human race, which had never ceased to transmit a few survivors from one of these epochs to the next, was almost destroyed by famine.