San Tradition

goddess · San / Namibia

Coti

Wife of the Mantis

Coti appears in nineteenth-century /Xam narratives recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd as the wife of the Mantis, a trickster and creator figure often called |Kaggen in related San traditions. She belongs to a mythic family whose stories concern animals, celestial bodies, hunger, death and the unstable ordering of the early world. San traditions are diverse, so one recorded cycle should not stand for every community.