The mai are spirits of the low ground and of its waters and wild places, dangerous beings blamed for certain sicknesses and misadventures suffered in the forest and swamp. They belong to the cold, wet, lower half of the Maring cosmos, the region governed by Koipa Mangiang, and are propitiated or avoided rather than honored with the great pig feasts owed to the ancestors. Sources differ on whether the mai are a class of spirit clearly distinct from the ancestral spirits of rot or an aspect of the encompassing low-ground domain; the Maring themselves draw the boundary loosely, treating the beings of the low country as a single wet, generative, but perilous power.