When Maya artists gave shape to the divine in paintings and sculpture, they made distinct theological choices about corporal form and surface features as they personified natural forces. The sun, falling rain, lightning, maize, and other phenomena grew heads, arms, and legs as fully fledged deities with names, attributes, and histories. A new exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum will explore the rich imagery of Classic Maya deities created by artists in what is now Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras in the first millennium. This presentation situates the Maya case study within other global representations of the sacred and traces concepts of divinity throughout Mesoamerica. Then follows a focused investigation at how artists represented the kinetic and electric energy of tropical rainstorms as Chahk, a fearsome, axe-wielding Rain God, and K’awiil, a reptilian being symbolic of Chahk’s axe and the fractal flashes of lightning.