Chaac
Chaac is the Yucatec Maya god of rain, thunder, and lightning, depicted with a long down-curled snout, reptilian features, and shell ornaments, wielding an axe or serpent with which he strikes the clouds to release the rains and the thunder. He is characteristically quadripartite, envisioned as four Chaacs stationed at the cardinal directions and bound to the directional colors: red in the east, white in the north, black in the west, and yellow in the south. The most-depicted figure in the Postclassic codices, where he corresponds to God B, Chaac remains the object of living petitionary ritual: the Ch'a Chaak ceremony is still performed in Yucatec villages to summon rain for the maize milpa, its officiants imitating the frogs that call the storm.
Domains
- rain
- storm
- agriculture
Powers
- strike lightning with a stone axe
- pour rain upon the milpa
Epithets
- Chaac Xib Chaac — Red Man Chaac (of the east)Karl Taube, The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan (1992) (secondary)
- Yaxal Chaac — Green/first ChaacJ. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (1970) (secondary)
Sources
- Chaac is the Yucatec god of rain, thunder, and lightning, quadrupled into four directional-color aspects positioned at the corners of the world.: Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, trans. Tozzer (1941) (primary); Karl Taube, The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan (1992), pp. 17-27 (secondary)
- Chaac corresponds to codical God B and is the most frequently depicted deity in the Dresden and Madrid codices.: Codex Dresdensis; Codex Tro-Cortesianus (Madrid Codex) (primary)