The toli does three things at once, and the ethnographic accounts rarely separate them. It is armour: hung across the chest and back of a costume, a disc turns aside what would otherwise strike the wearer, and a practitioner expecting difficulty puts on more of them. It is a seat: a spirit called to attend can settle on the disc, so the toli is a place as much as an object. And it is a surface: polished bronze holds an image, and the literature records practitioners looking into a toli for what is out of sight, whether that is a lost animal, an absent person or the cause of an illness.
The discs vary considerably. Some are plain and lightly domed with a boss at the centre. Others carry cast designs, animals, whorls or Chinese characters that the wearer may or may not read. They are pierced or looped for a cord and hung singly or in numbers, and a fully equipped costume can carry a substantial weight of metal.
Because bronze rings, the toli also contributes sound. A practitioner in motion is audible before being visible, and the mirrors, the pendants on the coat and the drum together produce a continuous metallic noise that the accounts treat as part of the work rather than as a side effect of the equipment.