Naawun, glossed 'Heaven', is the supreme and remote power of Talensi cosmology, the ultimate source or Final Cause of everything that exists. Talensi thought offers no account of a creation event and builds no shrine to Heaven, worshipping instead the Earth and the ancestors through whom Heaven's ordering reaches human life. Naawun's most active role is in the doctrine of Destiny: before birth a person is said to be 'with Heaven' and to declare aloud the wishes that fix their Spoken Destiny (nuor-yin), so that misfortune traced to a self-chosen malignant Destiny is understood as the working-out of that prenatal declaration. Meyer Fortes drew on this scheme in comparing the Talensi vision of fate with the Greek story of Oedipus and the biblical Job.