Chaac
The Maya god of rain, thunder and lightning, drawn in the codices with a long, hanging nose and a lightning axe in his hand. Yucatec Maya farmers still hold the Ch’a Cháak ceremony to ask the chaacs for rain.
Meaning
Chaac (also written Chac or Chaak) is the god of rain, thunder, lightning and water in general. Mercedes de la Garza of UNAM’s Centre for Maya Studies calls him perhaps the most venerated and most often shown of the Maya gods, above all in the Yucatán peninsula in the Postclassic period. In the codices he has a human body and a face with a long hanging nose, in which a serpent’s upper jaw merges with a tapir’s snout, topped by a scroll that curls upward. His eye is a serpent’s, with a spiral pupil, and a curved serpent fang comes out of the corner of his mouth. He often holds his lightning axe; sometimes he carries a torch, the sign of drought, or pours water from a jar. Serpents, the chief sign of water in Mesoamerica, wind round his body or come out of his mouth. Chaac is also four gods, one for each direction, and Yucatec Maya farmers today speak of the chaacs, in the plural.
Origin and history
Chaac is among the oldest Maya gods. Karl Taube finds him, as God B, the lord of rain and lightning, in the Late Preclassic (100 BC to AD 100) and from the beginning of Maya civilisation, with epithets such as Chac Xib Chac and Yaxhá Chac. In 1904 Paul Schellhas lettered the gods of the three surviving Maya codices; God B is the one shown most often in them, for what de la Garza calls his clear meaning of rain and lightning. Dresden Codex page 35b and Madrid Codex page 4a show his head joined to a serpent’s body, or the god walking before a serpent whose body holds water.
His name comes from colonial writings. The Motul dictionary says Chaac was a giant of a man who taught farming and was afterwards held to be god of the crops, of water, thunder and lightning; the Chilam Balam of Chumayel says “the chaacs were not gods, they were giants”. Diego de Landa wrote that on the day Yax people held a feast for the chaacs, “whom they held to be gods of the maize fields”. In the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, a Late Postclassic effigy censer from Mayapán shows Chaac with bags of copal hanging from his arms, a ball of burning copal in his left hand and a jar of water in his right, painted blue for water and red for war and sacrificial death.
Ch’a Cháak: calling the rain
Ch’a cháak means “bringing the rain”. The anthropologist Alicia Barabas describes the ceremony that Yucatec Maya villages, neighbourhoods or groups of families hold when drought demands it, led by a h-men, a shaman of proven standing. It is a petition for rain and also a way of speaking to the yuntziloob, the lords of nature who govern the maize cycle. Maya maize farmers say that “chaac is like our godfather, he tells the true God how we are, how we live here on earth”. The four legs of the altar table stand for the four bacabs who hold up the world, the four directions and the four chaacs, each called by his direction: lakin yum chaac, Lord of the East; chakin yum chaac, Lord of the West; nohol yum chaac, Lord of the South; xaman yum chaac, Lord of the North. The NMAI’s Living Maya Time lists Cha’a Chac among the ceremonies Yucatec farmers hold in the same months each year, and Pa Puul, “breaking pots”, on 24 June, also to ask for rain. De la Garza adds that people in the peninsula still believe the chaacs protect the maize fields.
Chaac, Tlaloc and the Olmec rain god
In a chart first published in 1946, Miguel Covarrubias traced the Aztec Tlaloc, the Zapotec Cocijo and the Maya Chaac to one Olmec prototype, and related the rain gods’ fangs and snarling mouths to the jaguar. Taube judges the scheme essentially sound, with one correction: the Classic Maya faces Covarrubias took for Chaac are a witz, a mountain given an animal’s features, which goes with the rain god in meaning but is not him. A long-nosed face on a Maya building is not always Chaac.
See also
Tlaloc, Were-jaguar, Itzamna, Kukulkan, Maize God, Maya calendar.
Sources
- ¿Quién es Chaac? (Mercedes de la Garza, Arqueología Mexicana), Mercedes de la Garza, “Chaac, la sacralidad del agua”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 96, pp. 35–39, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- Chaac, la sacralidad del agua (Mercedes de la Garza, Arqueología Mexicana), Mercedes de la Garza, “Chaac, la sacralidad del agua”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 96, pp. 35–39, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- Antiguos dioses mayas (Karl A. Taube, Arqueología Mexicana), Karl A. Taube, “Antiguos dioses mayas”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 20, pp. 20–29, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- Portaincensario de Chaac, Mayapán, Yucatán (Arqueología Mexicana), Arqueología Mexicana, edición especial 44, Mundo maya. Esplendor de una cultura, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), object description
- Ch’a Cháac: el ritual maya de Yucatán para pedir la lluvia y proteger la milpa (Alicia M. Barabas, Arqueología Mexicana), Alicia M. Barabas, “Rituales de los mayas de Yucatán: el ch’a chaac”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 198, pp. 14–15, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- El dios de la lluvia olmeca (Karl A. Taube, Arqueología Mexicana), Karl A. Taube, “El dios de la lluvia olmeca”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 96, pp. 26–29, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text
- The Calendar System (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, The Calendar System
- Corn and Calendar Traditions (Living Maya Time), Living Maya Time, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Corn and Calendar Traditions
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Last reviewed October 3, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research
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