The kontome, singular konton and known as kontomblé among the Dagara of Burkina Faso, are the beings of the wild: small spirit-beings that inhabit the uncultivated bush, the hills, the water and the earth. Because Naangmin the creator has withdrawn beyond reach, the kontome occupy the crucial middle ground between the human world and God's, and it is they who carry knowledge downward. In the Bagre recitations a being of the wild becomes the teacher of the first humans, revealing the arts of cultivation, iron-working, brewing and the making of culture itself, and guiding the questing younger brother on his journey toward God's country. In the teaching of the twentieth-century Dagara initiate and writer Malidoma Patrice Somé, the kontomblé remain living intermediaries encountered by diviners, small folk of the mineral and earth realm who speak on behalf of the spirit world.