Printed collections of Ifa verse do exist. Wande Abimbola, himself an initiate and a scholar, published selections in the 1970s that remain the standard academic point of entry, and William Bascom's fieldwork between the 1930s and the 1960s recorded a substantial body of material for both Ifa and the sixteen cowrie system. Practitioner publications in Nigeria, Cuba, Brazil and the United States have added a great deal more. None of these is the corpus and none of them claims to be. Each is a selection made by a particular person from what particular priests were willing to give.
This atlas does not reproduce, quote or closely paraphrase any ese, and that is a rule rather than an oversight. Ifa is a living religion. Its verses are transmitted through initiation and through a teaching relationship, and their circulation is part of what the priesthood is. Facts about the corpus, its structure, its language, how it is learned and what an ese does, are ordinary subjects of description and are described here. The verses themselves are not the atlas's to hand on.
The same rule covers the initiatory material around them. Itefa, the initiation that makes a babalawo, and the internal grades and obligations of that priesthood, are named here as closed and are not reconstructed. Where a reader wants the verses, the route is the one the tradition itself provides, which is a teacher, and the published scholarship is the honest second best.
Sources Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary CorpusWande Abimbola with Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West AfricaWilliam Bascom