Tamuno is the high creator of Kalabari religion, the maker of the world and of every living thing, whom narrators describe as shaping creation from delta mud. Alongside the cosmic Tamuno each person has an individual Tamuno who forms them by binding a life-soul, the teme, to the body; life continues while that bond holds and death comes when it is loosed. Bound up with this is the concept of so, personal destiny: before birth a spirit declares to Tamuno the fortunes it wishes, and these become the course its earthly life must follow. Tamuno stands above and apart from the three orders of lesser free spirits, the community heroes (oru), the ancestral dead (duein) and the water-people (owuamapu), all of whom are held to be lesser beings created by Tamuno. Sources differ on whether Tamuno is properly female or wholly beyond gender; Kalabari usage most often speaks of the creator as a mother-figure.