Koipa Mangiang is the paramount spirit of the low ground in Maring cosmology, counterpart and complement to the red spirits of the high forest. Where the high ground is hot, dry, red, and hard, his domain is cold, wet, and given over to rot and to the fertile growth that rot makes possible. He is not a deceased ancestor but a primordial being of the earth below, bound up with decay, with the fluids and softness of the low country, and with the increase of taro and of pigs. The spirits of rot, the ordinary dead who did not fall in battle, belong to his region. Sources vary on the precise reach of his powers, but he is consistently rendered as governing the low, damp world and the cycle of decomposition and regeneration that turns death back into life.