This is the most famous of a number of similar Mesoamerican calendar carvings. It is a 12-foot diameter, 25 ton stone carved in 1479 (long after the Maya demise but preceding the Spanish conquest), presently in the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico. It represents not just the annual calendar but also describes the cosmological epochs thought to have preceded the emergence of the Olmec, Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec cultures. The Sun god is at the center of the stone. The four panels surrounding him represent the cosmological epochs preceding the current epoch. Surrounding this are symbols for the annual calendar. Constellations are represented at the edge of the stone.

    The concept of the cyclic destruction and rebirth of the world is a common theme in Mesoamerican religion and mythology. On the famous Aztec calendar stone, surrounding the face of the Sun God, about whom all periodic phenomena in nature take place, we see four rectangular panels symbolizing the destruction of the world on each of the previous epochs through which it has passed. In the most remote epoch (upper right), giants who inhabited the earth were attacked and devoured by jaguars. At the upper left, the god of wind symbolizes the hurricanes that carried away the people of the second epoch. The third cosmogonic epoch, symbolized the god of fire-rain at the lower left, was destroyed by lava and fire in a great volcanic eruption. The few survivors were those who were able to transform themselves into birds. Storms and torrential rains epitomized by the water god ending the fourth epoch (lower right panel) caused men to be changed into fishes. In the present, or fifth, epoch destruction by earthquake is said to await us.