The Slender Girl

The slender girl is the first woman of the Bagre, known in Goody's translation by this epithet rather than by a personal name. Given as a wife in the country of God, she and her husband at first do not know how children are made; in the Black Bagre it is she who discovers the mystery of sexual intercourse, in some recitations by watching the boa, and then teaches it to the man, so that human begetting begins and the line of people on earth is founded. Her episode carries one of the myth's central concerns, the origin of procreation and the complementary knowledge of man and woman, and links the cosmic journey of the brothers to the ordinary continuity of Dagara households. As with the brothers, performers vary in how they tell her discovery.

Domains

• procreation sexuality
• marriage

Powers

• learns and transmits the secret of begetting
• bears the first human child

Epithets

• the slender girl — the slim young womanJack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (1972), English rendering of the Bagre epithet. (secondary)

Relations

• spouse: The Younger BrotherJack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (1972). (secondary)

Sources

• The slender girl is the first woman of the Bagre, given as wife in God's country, who discovers the mystery of intercourse and childbirth and transmits it to her husband, founding human procreation.: Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). (secondary); Alexis B. Tengan, Mythical Narratives in Ritual: Dagara Black Bagr (Peter Lang, 2006). (secondary)