A restricted-access courtyard with an altar designed to track the Venus cycle and paintings that today exist only in INAH archives raises a question archaeology has not fully answered: who exactly were the people who used this space, and what position did they occupy within the hierarchy of the complex and the city? The hypothesis that Atetelco housed a military elite—supported by the imagery of the White Courtyard—does not explain on its own the astronomical and ritual sophistication of the Red Courtyard. A space capable of managing the Venus calendar and sustaining an iconographic program of that complexity required specialized knowledge that was not accessible to all inhabitants of the city. The priest-astronomers proposed by researchers as possible users of this space may not have been a category separate from military or political power in Teotihuacan—they could have been part of the same system, people whose ability to read the sky and perform rituals at precisely the right moment was their primary form of authority.