Tlamacazqui

Boys destined for the priesthood, generally though not exclusively drawn from noble families, entered the calmecac, a boarding school attached to a major temple, where they were raised apart from ordinary Mexica life under strict discipline. Sahagun's informants describe a regimen of predawn rising, cold ritual bathing, fasting, sweeping and maintaining the temple precinct, and regular bloodletting from the ears, legs and tongue as an ongoing personal devotional practice rather than an occasional rite, alongside instruction in the sacred and solar calendars, the proper conduct of ceremonies, oratory, and the pictorial writing used to record ritual and historical knowledge.

The tlamacazqui title itself, built from a root meaning something close to giving or distributing, reflected the priesthood's role as intermediary, giving offerings to the gods on the community's behalf and, in Aztec understanding, receiving in turn the gods' favor and instruction to pass back to the people. Successful trainees could progress through a graded hierarchy of specialized offices distinguished by particular duties, among them the tlenamacaque, fire priests responsible for maintaining sacred fires and conducting fire-related rites central to major festivals.

Aztec education split along two main tracks, and the calmecac's priestly formation stood alongside, and in tension with, the telpochcalli, the neighborhood school that trained the great majority of commoner boys chiefly for warfare and civic life. A boy's family and calpulli, the local kin-based ward, generally determined which path he followed, though the calmecac was not formally closed to commoners of sufficient promise, and the two institutions were understood as producing the two kinds of service, religious and martial, that Mexica society depended on most directly, war itself carrying strong religious meaning in Aztec theology as a primary source of the sacrificial captives the state religion required.

Within Tenochtitlan's temple precinct, tlamacazque of different ranks and specializations served the city's many temples simultaneously, from the great dual shrine of the Templo Mayor down to smaller neighborhood and calpulli temples, giving the priesthood a scale and internal complexity that colonial-era chroniclers, drawing on the memories of Nahua informants who had themselves grown up within or alongside these institutions, worked to reconstruct in unusual ethnographic depth after the conquest disrupted the system itself.