The ile ori, house of the head, is a conical container covered in cowrie shells and beads, kept in the house and periodically fed — and the object is not the head, it is a shrine to the wearer's own destiny. Feeding it, ibori, is performed with cool water, gin, kola, honey or whatever the individual's divination specified, applied by the person's own hands to their own head. The theological weight of this is easy to miss. In a tradition with an elaborate priesthood, expensive initiations, hierarchies of orisha and a professional divinatory class, the highest authority over any given life is a private, unmediated relationship between a person and something inside their own skull that no priest can access, adjudicate or overrule. The odu that make this claim are among the best known, and they are frequently quoted by practitioners against priests who overreach.