A reader who wants to know what a babalawo does can be told, accurately and at length: he divines with Ifa, identifies the odu that has fallen, recites from the corpus attached to it, prescribes what is to be done, and holds in memory a body of material that takes years to learn. That is the public face of the office and there is no reason to be vague about it.
What is not set out here is what happens in initiation.
This is not because the material is unavailable. A good deal of it has been printed, by ethnographers working in the twentieth century, and more recently by people selling books and services to a market that wants access without obligation. Availability is the whole of the problem and none of the justification. That something is in print is not evidence that anyone entitled to release it did so.
The same reasoning covers the houngan and mambo entries, where the kanzo is closed, and it is the reasoning this atlas already applies to restricted mantras and to Native American ceremony.
There is also a practical point. Initiatory knowledge in these traditions is transmitted inside a relationship, to a particular person, by a particular elder, under obligations that continue afterwards. A description lifted out of that context is not a shortened version of the thing. It is a different thing, and it tends to be wrong in ways that only an initiate would notice.
On the sources for this entry
The scholarly literature on Ifa is real and is used here. Some of it, including the mid-century ethnographic corpus, published divination verses that practitioners had not agreed to release. Where such work is cited in this atlas it is cited for what it establishes about the structure and history of the office, and its own record on this question is noted rather than passed over.