Yanbike, the 'soul-lady', is the primordial first woman of the Bashkir cosmogonic epic and the wife of Yanbirde. Living in the earliest age with no people around them, she is the mother of Ural and Shulgen and so the ancestress of all humankind in the tradition. Her figure completes the primal couple whose household, and whose broken taboo on blood, sets the epic in motion.