Chaac is not only an archaeological figure. Among Yucatec Maya communities today the rain-deities live on as the chaacs or chaakob, and the agricultural ch'a chaak ceremony, a rain-petitioning rite performed by a h'men (ritual specialist), with offerings and prayers to call the rain for the maize, continues to be held in the present in parts of Yucatan, often blended with Catholic elements. Contemporary Maya religion is a living tradition in its own right, not merely a survival of the ancient one, and its rain-rituals are best understood on their own terms as much as through their evident continuity with the Classic-period cult of the rain-god.
Ethnographers and anthropologists have documented the ch'a chaak rain ceremony in Yucatec communities since at least the early twentieth century, and accounts show real variation from town to town in its details, offerings and timing, reflecting the same local diversity long documented across other living indigenous American rain-petitioning traditions rather than a single fixed rite. Community elders and h'menob generally treat the specifics of the ceremony as belonging properly to their own local practice, and outside descriptions accordingly tend to stay at the level of general structure, the invocation of the four directional rain-bringers, offerings of food and drink, prayer, rather than reproducing the ceremony's particular words.