Calmécac was one of the ceremonial buildings also used for the instruction of young men belonging to the Mexica noble class. As Frair Bernardino de Sahagún describes, this space was where they were taught good habits, doctrine and trades to live a “chaste life” and become “priests and ministers of the idols.” The patron of Calmécac was Quetzalcóatl, who the novices made offerings to through penitence, paper, incense and gold and feather adornments. The highest level of the ministers were the quequetzalcoa, who was recognized as the deity’s successor. In addition to the statues of the main god, the architecture of the buildings included elements that identified the grounds as the “house of Quetzalcóatl;” for example, documentary sources and recent archeological discoveries in the Templo Mayor show the presence of parapets shaped like a sectioned snail, distributed along the top of the building, not put there by chance.
A sectioned snail is one of Quetzalcóatl’s emblems and also of his dimension as the wind god, Ehécatl. Several representations show him wearing this element like a breastplate called ehecacózcatl or “wind jewel,” made out of different species of snail, such as the Strombus gigas, common to the Gulf of Mexico. This adornment is also characteristic of Xótol, morning star and Quetzalcóatl’s nocturnal twin, in charge of accompanying the Sun as it travels through the underworld. In terms of symbology, snails are indicative of water, fertility, rain and the underworld, since they are aquatic; their spiral alludes to the gusts of wind and the whirlpools sent by Ehécatl to “sweep the roads” the needed rain will travel through, for the survival of plants and human beings.
In the same vein, the sound of snails has a magical function, as the “voice of the wind” and is believed to be able to attract the forces of fertility from the ocean. Therefore, in the myths, playing trumpets made from snails appears as a driver of creative forces, as is told in the “Legend of the Suns,” when Quetzalcóatl makes the Mictlantecuhtli snail sound to take the bones of the Mictlán and create humankind. Among the contemporary indigenous groups along the Gulf coast, snails hold similar propitiatory functions, because of which many ritual specialists are careful when making them sound, because they believe the sound could unleash a catastrophic storm that could destroy the world. Therefore, condensed into the snail are the wind, water and ocean, not just to bring on beneficial rains, but also to keep the cycles of life and death in continuous motion.