Some devotees keep a physical emblem of the inner head, the ibori: a small conical form, made up under the direction of a diviner, which is not a portrait of the head but a seat for it. The ibori is housed in a container called the ile ori, the house of the head, built of leather and cloth and covered over in cowrie shells and beads.
Those cowries were money. An ile ori accumulated them over the owner's life, so the container grew as the person prospered and the shrine was simultaneously a devotional object and a visible statement of standing. That double function is why so many ile ori are in museum collections in Europe and North America: once the cowrie ceased to be currency, the objects became collectable in a way that a working shrine ordinarily is not, and the finest of them left Yorubaland during the colonial period.
The practice crossed the Atlantic and changed on the way. In Cuban Regla de Ocha and in Brazilian Candomble a bori is performed, but it has been drawn into the sequence of initiation in a way it is not in Yorubaland, where it stands on its own as an act available to anyone at any time. Diaspora and Nigerian practitioners both call it bori and do not always mean the same thing by it, which is worth knowing before treating an account of one as an account of the other.