This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Museums and universities study sacred objects under a discipline usually called material religion, which treats an object as evidence of belief and practice rather than as an artifact valued only for its craftsmanship. That approach is deliberately outside the tradition it studies: it describes what an object does within a community's life without claiming any right to use it that way, and reputable scholarship in the field treats an object's own restrictions, on who may see it, hold it or reproduce its image, as a fact to respect rather than an obstacle to route around.
The ethics of this kind of study became a matter of public law as well as academic convention. In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 required museums receiving federal funds to inventory sacred and culturally significant objects in their collections and, on request, return them to the communities they came from, formally recognizing that holding an object is not the same as having the right to keep it. The atlas follows the same distinction: describing an object's history and meaning is not the same as claiming access to it.
That same principle now guides how a museum or a reference work handles the image of a restricted object as much as the object itself, since a photograph or a detailed drawing can defeat a tradition's own restriction just as effectively as physical possession would, and current scholarly practice in the field treats an image restriction as seriously as it treats a physical one.