Yucatec religion in the colonial and modern periods keeps a set of figures that can be traced back into the classic period. The Chaacs, rain deities associated with the four directions and each with a colour, are addressed in the ceremony a village holds when rain is late, conducted by an h'men, a specialist who works with prayer, offering and a table set out for the purpose. Karl Taube's study of the major gods of ancient Yucatan connects those figures to the deities of the codices and the monuments.
The world tree, a ceiba standing at the centre with four coloured trees at the directions, orders space, and the cenotes, the sinkholes that are the peninsula's only surface water, are entrances to what lies beneath. The great cenote at Chichen Itza received offerings of objects and of people, which is one of the places where archaeology and the colonial reports agree with one another.
The books of Chilam Balam are the tradition's own colonial literature: manuscripts kept in Yucatec towns and recopied over generations, mixing prophecy, chronicle, calendar, medicine and material taken from Spanish books. They are why the Yucatec calendar and its cycles are known in such detail. Matthew Restall and Amara Solari's study shows how one of those cycles was turned into a global apocalypse by outsiders in 2012.