Chaac

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A farmer in a Yucatec village watches the sky in late April. The rains should break before the maize goes into the dry ground, and they have not. So a clearing is prepared at the edge of the field, four green saplings bent into an arch over a table of fresh-cut boughs, the table laid toward the four directions. An old man who knows the words begins to chant, and at the four corners of the table four boys crouch and croak like frogs. They are calling the frogs that are the heralds of the rain, and through the frogs they are calling the one who sends it. The chant names him over and over, turning to each quarter of the world in turn, because he is not one but four, and each of the four must be asked.

He is Chaac, the lord of the rain and the thunder and the lightning, and of all the gods of the Maya he is the one the farmer cannot do without.

The long-nosed god

In the script of the Classic period his name is written Chahk; in the Yucatec of the colonial and modern Maya it is Chaac or Chaak. He is the god of rain, of thunder, of the lightning that splits the sky before the storm. Among the peoples of Mesoamerica he has cousins: the Tlaloc of the Aztecs, the Cocijo of the Zapotecs, gods of the same office under other names. But the Maya rain-god has a face entirely his own.

It is the most recognizable face in the whole repertoire of Maya art. The body is part human, scaled like a reptile or an amphibian; the head is not a man’s. The mouth shows curved fangs. Above all there is the nose, long and pendulous and curling, so distinctive that the early students of the Maya, before they could read a word of the script, knew him at sight. When the German scholar Paul Schellhas set out at the turn of the twentieth century to catalog the gods of the surviving codices by letter, not yet able to name them, the rain-god became God B — and God B is everywhere. In the Dresden Codex, the great folding-book of Maya astronomy and divination, he is depicted more than a hundred and thirty times, more than any other figure in the manuscript. He sits in the rain, he walks in the rain, he wields his weapon, he pours the water from a jar. No god is drawn more often, because no god is needed more often.

His weapon is the lightning. He carries a shield and an axe, and the axe is itself a god: the serpent-footed deity the Yucatec called Bolon Dzacab and the Classic Maya called K’awiil, lord of lightning and of the lineage and the fertile earth. When Chaac strikes with the axe, the bolt falls. There is a story, old enough to be read in the Classic imagery and still told in pieces among the living Maya, that the first maize was hidden inside a mountain, sealed in the stone where no one could reach it; and that Chaac brought his lightning-axe down on the mountain and split it open, so that the grain spilled out for the people. The rain-god is thus present at the very origin of the food. He does not merely water the maize. He freed it.

That the lightning and the maize should belong to the same act is the deep logic of the figure. The maize is the Maya creature in a sense that goes beyond food: the Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ book of the world’s making, tells that the gods tried clay and then wood and at last made true human beings out of ground maize, so that the people are themselves the grain made flesh. To strike the rain into the field is to strike at the substance of which the people are made. The rain-god’s axe and the rain-god’s water are two faces of one office, and the office is the keeping-alive of the world.

Four at the corners of the world

The Maya did not always conceive of Chaac as one. More commonly he is four — the Chaacs, the Chaacob, one standing at each of the four corners of the cosmos, each turned toward a direction, each clothed in the color that belongs to that direction.

The east is red, the quarter of the rising sun, and there stands Chac Xib Chaac, the Red Chaac. The north is white, Sac Xib Chaac. The west, where the sun goes down, is black, Ek Xib Chaac. The south is yellow, Kan Xib Chaac. Some accounts set a fifth at the center, green, the axis of the world. This four-fold and color-coded order is not peculiar to the rain-god; it is the architecture of the whole Maya world, which is square, oriented, and held up at its corners. But it is in Chaac that the scheme is most insistently expressed, because the rain comes from the directions — from this quarter or that the clouds build, from one corner the storm walks across the sky — and so the rain-god is rightly plural, a council of four turning the heavens between them, each pouring his own quarter’s water.

To pray for rain, then, is never to pray to a single being. It is to address the four in their order, to set the table toward the four directions, to call each Chaac to send what is his to send. The frog is the rain’s herald because the frogs sing before the storm; and so at the corners of the cornfield altar the four boys take the parts of the frogs of the four directions, and their croaking is a summons.

The water without which there is nothing

To grasp what Chaac is, one has to grasp the land. The Yucatan peninsula is a slab of porous limestone with almost no rivers on its surface. The rain that falls drains straight down through the stone, and the only standing water is where the limestone roof has collapsed into the water table below, opening a great natural well. The Maya call such a well a cenote (from Yucatec tz’onot). The cenotes were the wells of the dry country, and they were also doorways — openings in the surface of the world down into the watery underworld from which, in the Maya understanding, the rain itself ultimately rises. Chaac was held to dwell not only above in the storm but below, in the caves and the cenotes where the waters of creation move.

A world that depends so utterly on a rain that may or may not come is a world that bends its whole religious effort toward securing it. The offerings made to Chaac were accordingly the costliest a community could give. At Chichen Itza, the great Postclassic city of the northern lowlands, a broad causeway runs north from the central precinct to the edge of a vast cenote, the Cenote Sagrado, the Sacred Cenote, its sheer walls dropping to dark water far below. Into it, according to both the Maya record and the Spanish accounts written after the conquest, the people cast their offerings to the rain-god: gold and jade and copper, copal incense, worked shell and rubber and pottery — and, at need, human lives.

The cenote was dredged and dived early in the twentieth century, between 1904 and 1910, by the American consul and amateur excavator Edward Herbert Thompson, who hauled up tens of thousands of objects — the gold and the jade and the rest — and shipped many of them out of the country, to the loss of Mexico and the lasting controversy of the operation. Among what came up were human bones, on the order of two hundred individuals, and study of the remains has found injuries consistent with sacrifice. The grim arithmetic of the place is best held without flinching and without relish. In a world where the failure of the rain meant the failure of the maize, and the failure of the maize meant death, the people gave to the rain-god what they reckoned most precious, on the principle that runs through the whole of Maya religion: that the gods sustain the people and the people must sustain the gods, that the order of the world is a reciprocity of gift and counter-gift, and that the greatest gift is life itself. The cenote offerings were the extreme expression of an exchange that, in its ordinary form, was simply the farmer’s prayer.

The Codz Poop (“Rolled Matting”) at Kabah, its facade faced with rows of long-nosed Chaac masks. Photograph by Hermann Luyken, 2002, CC BY-SA 3.0.

That ordinary reciprocity built the rain-god’s face into the very stone of the cities. In the hill-country of the northwest — the Puuc region, whose elegant Late Classic style flowered at Uxmal and Kabah and Sayil and Labna around the eighth and ninth centuries — the masons covered their buildings with the long-nosed mask, the curling stone snout repeated along the friezes, set at the corners, stacked one above another. At Kabah the building called the Codz Poop, the “Rolled Matting,” carries on its facade some two hundred and fifty masks of Chaac, end to end and ground to roof, the god’s hooked nose projecting again and again from the wall — a repetition without parallel anywhere else in Maya building. To stand before it is to be looked at by the rain-god a few hundred times at once. The corner of every Puuc building, where the masks cluster, is in effect the corner of the world, and the god of the rain is set to guard it.

The god who did not fade

When the Spanish came, the high apparatus of Maya religion came down. The cities of the Classic lowlands had already been abandoned for centuries by the time of the conquest — the great collapse of the southern lowland centers fell in the eighth and ninth centuries, and its causes are still argued over. But the religion lived on in the Postclassic kingdoms and the colonial villages, and there the friars set themselves against it. In 1562 the Franciscan Diego de Landa, confronting evidence of continued offering to the old gods in the Yucatan, held an auto-da-fe at Mani and burned the Maya books — the painted codices, the libraries of a literate people — so that of the hundreds that once existed only four are known to survive. It is one of the bitter ironies of the record that the same Landa, having destroyed the books, then wrote the fullest colonial account of Maya religion that we possess, so that much of what can be said about the old worship is owed to the man who did the most to end it. The historian reads him carefully and against the grain.

The high gods of the Maya — the creators, the sky-gods, the lords of the sun — receded under the new religion, absorbed or displaced or driven underground. Chaac did not recede. The reason is plain enough: the rain still had to come or the maize would fail, and no Spanish saint replaced the rain-god in the cornfield so completely that the cornfield could do without him. And so, of all the gods of the ancient Maya, the rain-god is perhaps the most persistent. He is still asked for rain.

A page of the Dresden Codex, the great Maya folding-book in which the rain-god appears more than any other figure. Public domain (from Förstemann’s 1880 edition).

The ceremony is called the Cha-Chaac (Ch’a Cháak, “to fetch the rain”), and it is performed to this day in the villages of the Yucatan, in the dry weeks before the planting or whenever the rains hold off and the crop stands in danger. It is led by a ritual specialist, the h-men, the village’s keeper of the old prayers, who knows the proper order and the proper words. In a clearing in the field — the milpa, the cornfield that is the center of Maya life — an altar is built, an arch of green over a table of boughs, oriented to the four directions, a post at each corner for each of the four Chaacs, so that the whole structure is a small model of the four-cornered world. On it are laid the offerings the rain-god is owed: the great layered breads of maize and squash-seed baked in the earth oven, and balche, the fermented honey drink, poured out for the gods. The h-men chants to Chaac, turning to each direction in its turn, calling the four. And at the four corners crouch the four boys, croaking like the frogs of the four directions, calling the rain. A Christian prayer is braided now into the old petition — the village is Catholic, and the saints are named alongside the Chaacs without any sense of contradiction — but the structure underneath is the structure the Codz Poop was built on, and the request is the same one the people have made of the rain-god for as long as they have grown maize: that the water come.

It is worth marking why the braiding holds. The friars who came after the conquest could offer their own god and their own saints in place of the lords of the sky, and over generations the high gods of the Maya did give way to them or merge with them. But the rain over the milpa is not a matter the parish church was ever organized to address. The maize is planted by the household, in a field cleared by the household, on a schedule set by the rains; and the rains are Chaac’s. Where the old religion and the new could compete — over the making of the world, the fate of the soul, the lords of heaven — the new often won. Over the specific, recurring, agricultural emergency of the rain that has not yet come, there was nothing to compete with the Chaacs, and so the Chaacs were kept, the way a tool is kept that does the one job nothing else does. The 2012 turning of the Long Count, which the wider world briefly took for a Maya prophecy of the world’s end, was no such thing — the Maya themselves recorded dates reaching far past it — and the better measure of the calendar’s truth is not any imagined apocalypse but the unbroken keeping of the rain-rite season after season, the cosmos asked again to do what it has always done.

The Yucatec Maya are a living people, several million strong, speaking their language and working their fields. They are not a vanished race and their gods are not all dead. The high lords of the old pantheon — Itzamna the creator, Kinich Ahau the sun, Ix Chel of the moon and the birth-bed — survive mostly now in the codices and the inscriptions and the long work of decipherment that has, in the past hundred years, given us back the ability to read the Classic name Chahk in the stone where it was carved. But Chaac himself survives in a place the others do not. He survives in the field, in the dry season, in the mouths of the four boys who are the frogs, in the petition of a people to the god on whom the maize and the rain and the living depend, who must be fed if he is to feed, and who must, above all, be asked.

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