Ori is the most distinctive idea in Yoruba religion and the one most often left out of summaries. Before birth each person kneels in heaven and selects an Ori — usually translated inner head — which carries the destiny for the life to come, and the choosing is forgotten immediately on entering the world. Ori is treated as a personal orisha: it has its own shrine object, the ile ori, a beaded conical container holding cowries, and it is fed directly. The tradition's standing claim is that a person's Ori outranks all the other orisha in that person's affairs — the odu say repeatedly that no divinity blesses a person without the sanction of their Ori, and that when everything else abandons you, Ori remains. This produces an unusual theological structure: an intensely communal religion whose final authority over any individual life is located inside that individual and is unavailable to anyone else, including the priesthood.